Monsanto’s GM alfalfa contaminates Washington crops

Rady Ananda
Activist Post

An eastern Washington field has been contaminated with Roundup Ready alfalfa, the state Ag Department confirmed on Friday. The farmer reports he did not plant it, nor wants it.

Of course we knew this was going to happen. Alfalfa seeds are only 2mm in size and can spread for miles on the wind alone. The Oregon crew who sabotaged the GM beet fields in June didn’t go far enough.

Alfalfa is planted on 17 million acres in the US and earns over $8 billion a year, reports Reuters, adding:

Exports of hay, including alfalfa, have been rising, hitting a record $1.25 billion in 2012, according to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. Washington state is one of the largest producers of alfalfa for export.

Alfalfa is the most common forage used for grazing, and the organic meat and dairy industries are dependent on GMO-free hay.

Not only the organic industry, but biotech’s inability to contain their product is also economically sabotaging export farmers who use chemicals, but not GM seeds.

If we don’t stop the federal government from favoring the “death tech” industry (as Vandana Shiva calls it), all our food will be genetically modified, whether they label it or not, whether we like it or not.

When Bayer’s GM rice contaminated a third of all US rice in 2006, no regulator stopped them: not the USDA, the EPA nor even the judicial system.

“Regulators” are “still investigating” the GM wheat contamination in Oregon last May. The $8 billion wheat export business took a hit this year, and will likely suffer next year, thanks to another act of economic sabotage, the blame for which falls squarely on Monsanto, the company that brought us Agent Orange.

But, throwing money at the problem won’t fix it: Federal “regulators” and the biotech industry are contaminating all natural crops, whether we like it or not. This problem will not go away without serious intervention, because they do not want it to: this is the plan. The GM experiment started here, and contamination is worse here than anywhere else.

“Regulators” have allowed GM crops to be planted in our wildlife refuges. Our refuges! The source of vast biodiversity, where pollinators caught a break from all the chemical farms. No more. Biotech’s nasty chemicals see to that. Oh, sure, we won a partial victory back in 2011, when the US Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) agreed to yank GM plants from 11 Northeast states. In 2012, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, et al. got two dozen Southeastern refuges to be GM-free. The same plaintiffs just filed suit last month, again against the FWS, for allowing GM crops in refuges in Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Minnesota.

Anyone who believes that only less than half of California voters want GMO foods labeled, when 95% of the nation wants it, should just keep voting. But know this: All electronic vote counting systems can be hacked without detection. There are dozens of independent scientific studies proving this. Good luck on I-522, Washington. I genuinely suggest you hand count paper ballots.

It’s a good thing the Organic Growers and Seed Traders Assn, representing 300,000 people and over 4,500 farms, has taken their case to the US Supreme Court. They KNOW their fields will be contaminated. They are demanding a covenant not to sue (because in this Orwellian world, Monsanto sues farmers whose fields they destroy with their product, whose livelihoods they destroy, whose export business they destroy).

But, maybe not such a good thing to take this to SCOTUS. In 2010, Monsanto lackeys including Clarence Thomas (former Monsanto lawyer) and Elena Kagan, deregulated GM alfalfa, despite evidence proving contamination would be unavoidable.

Talk about collateral damage. In fact, that’s the same term used by State Sen. Maralyn Chase, who told The Oregonian that Washington’s alfalfa contamination shows the dangers of genetically modified crops:

“Our state’s farmers are becoming collateral damage to the reckless practices of the agriculture industry in this country,” Chase said. “More than 60 of our trade partners throughout the world have bans on the import of unlabeled GMO foods.”

This government, now fronted by Obama, is about to bomb the life out of Syria, the same government that sprayed so much Agent Orange in Vietnam that four generations later, they’re still producing malformed babies.

Both companies who profited from that contract, Dow and Monsanto, also produce genetically modified seeds and a requisite ecocidal chemical soup their seeds require. Those companies should have been shut down, permanently, for the number of lives they’ve destroyed, here in the States as well.

Truly, now is the time for all good folk to come to the aid of the planet.

Rady Ananda is the creator of Food Freedom News and COTO Report, Rady Ananda’s work has appeared in several online and print publications, including four books. With a B.S. in Natural Resources from Ohio State University’s School of Agriculture, Rady tweets @geobear7 and @RadysRant .