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GM Crops
Here the differences are more to do with the practice of how crops are regulated rather than whether they should be allowed in principle. Neither candidate opposes GM foods.
Mr Bush says it is important that the "regulatory framework keeps pace with science," a hint that it can be too restrictive.
Mr Kerry talks about how important it is to "give government agencies the power to effectively regulate genetically modified food products". And he gives a nod to international concerns by saying that he would work to address these while Mr Bush stresses the role of GM food in "meeting the world's demand for food".
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BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - The government has ordered all papaya trees in a plantation in northeastern Thailand to be destroyed after one fruit sample there was found to have been genetically modified, a minister said Wednesday.
The owner of the plantation in Khon Kaen province is one of 2,600 farmers who bought papaya seedlings from a nearby horticulture research station that is conducting field trials of genetically modified, or GM, papaya.
Agriculture Minister Somsak Thepsuthin said in interviews with local radio stations that officials tested 239 samples from the plantation and found only one GM papaya.
"Even though such a small amount was found I have ordered the destruction of all papaya plants,'' Somsak said.
He said he ordered the research station to immediately suspend the field experiments and to collect papaya samples from all the 2,600 farmers.
An investigation will also be conducted to find out whether the GM seeds were smuggled out of the research station or had spread by cross pollination, he said.
The Thai government does not allow commercial farming of GM crops but has been growing GM papayas at three research facilities including the one in Khon Kaen. Any farmer found to be planting genetically engineered crops faces up to two years in jail or a 4,000 baht (US$100, euro 80) fine.
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Bob Klein has helped raise millions of dollars in support of stem cell research.
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Over three decades, Bob Klein amassed a fortune by building and financing low-income housing. After his 14-year-old son was diagnosed with diabetes in 2001, however, he redirected his considerable political clout and business savvy.
The longtime Democrat has since become one of the biggest private patrons of human embryonic stem cell research -- medical technology that many scientists believe can someday cure a wide range of ailments, including diabetes.
"As a father you can't turn your back on something like this," Klein said. "I'm committed totally to this."
Stem cells appear in the first days after conception and create all the cells, tissues and organs that make up the human body. Scientists hope to someday cure disease by transplanting healthy stem cells into sick people.
Diabetes researchers say they may someday be able to turn stem cells into insulin-producing cells, which could be implanted in diabetics and eliminate the need for injections.
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Bangkok, Sep 17 : Greenpeace Thursday warned that some 1,000 genetically modified (GM) papaya trees chopped down and buried in northeastern Thailand Wednesday might spring back, multiply and contaminate the soil as they were improperly destroyed.
"Their method of burying the papaya trees without separating the seeds will enable them to grow in multiples later on," Greenpeace Southeast Asia director Jiragorn Gajaseni said, Xinhua reports quoting the Bangkok Post.
The GM papaya trees were chopped down and buried in two-metre-deep pits and though officials in charge of the task said "strict measures" were ensured for full destruction of the trees, Greenpeace called it "inept" taking various factors like the weather into consideration.
"The proper way to do it is to put all the trees into some kind of sealed container and wait for it to rot, avoiding any chance of contamination," said Jiragorn.
A GM researcher from Kasetsart University, however, said: "The pit is deep enough and in a few months all the papayas will rot and there will be no trace of GM contamination."
The Thai government gave its nod to larger scale GM research and commercialisation of products in late August but the policy was soon aborted under pressure of protests from activists and farmers.
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By JOHN M. BRODER and ANDREW POLLACK
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 19 - The federal government spent $25 million last year on studies involving human embryonic stem cells. But California, in an act of political and scientific rebellion against limits on stem cell research imposed by the Bush White House, may be on the verge of spending $300 million a year in each of the next 10 years on such research.
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A coalition of Hollywood producers and actors, technology billionaires, scientists, patient advocates and business organizations - including Michael J. Fox and Bill Gates - has marshaled emotion, scientific argument and money to underwrite a state ballot proposal that would let Californians make the decision. The initiative on the Nov. 2 ballot, known as Proposition 71, would authorize the state to issue $3 billion in bonds to pay for a range of stem cell research. This promising but ethically controversial field of biomedical research is now severely limited by the Bush administration's policy restricting public money for research on embryonic stem cells.
Others are also moving to facilitate more stem cell research. Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey signed legislation in May to establish a state-supported stem cell research facility, and researchers at Harvard are raising millions of dollars for a stem cell institute.
But the California initiative would create by far the largest state-run scientific research effort in the country and make California a global center of stem cell research, on par with Singapore, Israel, South Korea and the United Kingdom, which have moved aggressively in the field since the late 1990's.
Critics say the initiative would be a publicly financed windfall for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, while repaying little to the taxpayers. They expect to be outspent by at least 20 to 1 by supporters of the initiative and add that the state cannot afford $3 billion in new debt when it is reducing spending on education, health care and public safety.
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By Alan, Guebert
E D I T O R I A L
The most important election in farm country this fall won't be in presidential swing states like Iowa and Wisconsin nor will it involve mad cows, angry Brazilians or even promise-spewing, glad-handing politicians.
No, the most important farm-centered election this year will be in Butte Country, Calif., where voters will choose whether to ban genetically modified crops and livestock in the third biggest rice-growing county in the U.S.
In ballot initiative-crazy California, this ballot initiative, called Measure D, is ringing alarm bells across the country. On Aug. 23, the American Farm Bureau's biggest bigfoot, national president Bob Stallman, rolled into Chico, the county's media center, to declare Measure D "anti-progress and anti-corporate." Other national farm groups have voiced similar criticisms.
As big as Butte County's proposed biotech ban could be, truth is it's a latecomer to the California anti-GM movement. On March 2, voters in nearby Mendocino County made it the first county in America to ban GM crops and animals. The vote wasn't close. After being outspent $700,000 to $135,000 in a heated campaign, anti-GM forces claimed a stunning 57 percent of the vote.
In early August, Trinity County, Calif., officials imposed a GM ban there. Currently, at least three other California counties have similar gene-ban initiatives on the Nov. 2 ballots.
All come just two years after biotech's giants -- Monsanto, DuPont and BASF among others -- crushed a statewide GM food labeling proposition in Oregon. One month before that 2002 election, polling showed voters favored GM food labeling nearly 2-to-1. Subsequently, the gene giants flooded the state in anti-labeling ads to drown the ballot initiative by a tidal 71-to-29 percent margin.
The California fight is taking a different route, though. With so many ballot initiatives in the country's largest ag state, GM proponents won't use greenbacks as much as true blue political contacts to beat the bans. They now appear to be leaping past expensive local battles to browbeat Sacramento for clear, pro-GM state legislation.
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By Keri Brenner
Leaders of Measure B, a Marin ballot measure to ban genetically altered crops, say they are bracing for an intense campaign over the next few weeks until the Nov. 2 elections.
"We're up against some real big money here," said Mark Squire of San Anselmo, of GMOFreeMarin, the measure's proponents. "The core of the issue is that big corporations are trying to direct our food choices and policies."
Squire, owner of Good Earth Natural Foods in Fairfax, said the organization has launched a major education drive on the issue. The campaign, he said, is to expose the truth about the dangers of genetically modified organisms to the nation's crops and food supplies.
A countywide forum is set for tomorrow in San Rafael, and other events - including an authors' talk Saturday at College of Marin and three showings of the film, "The Future of Food," by Deborah Koons-Garcia - are scheduled the next few weeks.
GMOFreeMarin, which has set up an office in San Anselmo, is seeking to raise $150,000 for mailings and other tools in the drive to counteract the anticipated biotech industry efforts.
But Lisa Dry, spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group, said her organization is not planning to flood Marin with an expensive promotional campaign as the biotech industry did in Mendocino County earlier this year.
CropLife America, a biotech industry trade group, spent a reported $621,000 in an unsuccessful campaign to defeat a genetically altered crops ban in Mendocino. Despite the influx of cash, some 56.5 percent of voters on March 2 approved the ban, making Mendocino one of the first counties in the nation to have such a law in place.
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China has planted more than a million genetically modified trees in a bid to halt the spread of deserts and prevent flash floods. But a bureaucratic loophole means that no one knows for sure where all the trees have been planted, or what effect they will have on native forests.
In the past five years, 8000 square kilometres of farmland in China has been converted to plantations. State foresters have focused on the headwaters of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers and Xinjiang province in the arid north-west, where the first field tests for GM trees were carried out in the late 1990s.
These plantations have been plagued by insect pests, so Chinese researchers have experimented by planting varieties of local poplar tree that have been genetically modified to resist the insects. But at a meeting on GM safety in Beijing in July, a number of scientists complained about the absence of proper controls over GM trees within China.
Xue Dayuan of the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Science says that the GMO Safety Administration Office of China's Ministry of Agriculture has no control over GM trees because they are not classified as crops. But the State Forestry Bureau, which oversees tree plantations, does not have a licensing system like the one run by the ministry, he told the meeting.
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The grass could see use on golf course putting greens
Pollen from a genetically modified grass has been shown to travel up to 21km away from the site where it was orginally planted.
This may be the longest recorded distance travelled by any GM pollen, US researchers have claimed.
They tracked the spread of genes from creeping bentgrass engineered to resist popular herbicides and which could be used on golf-course putting greens.
Details appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lidia Watrud and colleagues at the US Environmental Protection Agency tracked the flow of creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera L) pollen from an area containing an experimental crop in central Oregon, US.
After the pollination season, they gathered and raised seeds from wild and potted "sentinel" plants growing several km around the test plot.
Seedlings that had survived exposure to the herbicide Roundup were then checked to determine their genetic signatures.
The researchers found that plants growing within about 2km of the test plot were extensively contaminated with genes from the GM grasses.
But the team also found evidence of transgenic seed formation up to 21km downwind in potted sentinels and up to 14km away in wild plants.
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Plants to be tested to determine if they came from ministry research centre
Genetically modified (GM) papayas have been found on eight more farms in Khon KaenÍs Muang District, Agriculture Minister Somsak Thepsuthin said yesterday.
Somsak said that samples had now been collected from 1,164 of the 2,600 farms growing papayas in Khon Kaen. He said the ministry would finish collecting samples from the remaining farms by September 22.
The ministry will take a week to determine if the papayas were seedlings from the ministryÍs research centre in Tha Phra. If they were, a probe would be conducted to find out how the seedlings were smuggled from the centre, Somsak said.
ñIf the investigations find that farmers bought the GMO seedlings without knowing, they will not face punishment,ÍÍ Somsak said.
Associate Professor Supat Attatham of Kasetsart UniversityÍs Agriculture faculty deflected criticism from environmentalists over the university research centreÍs lack of safety measures to prevent removal of GM seedlings. He said the universityÍs centre grew only two rai of papayas and 100 trees per year.
Supat said that while the universityÍs centre has no security guards like at the Tha Phra centre, it was unlikely anyone could enter the experimental lab deep inside the compound. He also ruled out the possibility of contamination by pollens, saying the papayas were at least 0.5 kilometres from other seedlings.
Agriculture Department directorgeneral Chakan Saengraksawong said the department would give compensation to farmers whose papayas were found to be contaminated, while farmers whose papayas are free of contamination would get certificates of assurance.
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By Julie Grass
Ka Leo News Co-Editor
Most would probably just assume the food they buy at the grocery store is clean, not contaminated and safe to consume.
But this assumption may no longer be a safe one. A recent laboratory testing has found widespread contamination from the world's first commercially planted genetically engineered tree.
Papaya contamination has been detected on O'ahu, the Big Island and Kaua'i, along with contamination in non-genetically engineered seeds sold commercially by the University of Hawai'i.
The university, which created and released the genetically modified organisms, announced their findings earlier this month along with farmers, health professionals, concerned citizens and GMO-Free Hawaii, a grassroots coalition concerned with GMO's impact on the environment.
"It's an outrage that UH is selling contaminated papaya seeds to our local farmers and growers," said Toi Lahti, organic farmer and papaya grower from Big Island, where GMO papayas were commercially released in 1998.
Seed samples were sent to one of the world's leading scientific laboratories for genetic testing, Genetic ID, where samples from the Big Island and O'ahu were confirmed to be infected. Of the 20,000 papaya seeds tested from the Big Island, 50 percent were contaminated. Eighty percent of the seeds came from organic farms or from backyard gardens.
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