Comment by TraceConsult™: Germany’s # 1 retailer, EDEKA, has just announced it is joining the ranks of those stores that have begun months ago to do just that – offer their customers the opportunity to select milk and other dairy products stemming from cows reared without any biotech feed ingredients.  

Read EDEKA’s media statement (in German) or simply the article below and compare this to our coverage of a move undertaken by Rewe and tegut … dating back to last January when those two supermarket chains announced the conversion to “Ohne GenTechnik” labeled milk in their southern regions. At the end of this month (see our second coverage further below), the two chains will copy their own earlier move in Germany’s most populous state, NRW. The program now launched by EDEKA is in the northern region, significantly narrowing the gaps on the German map where consumers still have no choice when buying milk.

Comment by TraceConsult™: It was only in 2004 when Greenpeace activists thought they had detected scientific evidence that plant DNA – and their main focus was, of course, on transgenic plant DNA – had found its way into cow’s milk. Well, it turned out there had been some contamination and the alarm was off again.

But now the Munich based Institute for Independent Impact Assessment in Biotechnology has published findings that traces of GM corn and soy were found in various animal tissues as well as in milk. 

A new reason for food and retail industry strategists to re-think potential health risks emanating from GMO-fed animal products. After all, transgenic DNA from goat’s milk was also found in goatlings fed with this milk!

Comment by TraceConsult™: Proper assessment? - Environmental impact study (EIS)? - This has got to be terminology that is relatively new to the market leader in glyphosate-resistant GM crops – at least coming from the company’s own home turf.

The gist of a U.S. Federal Court’s decision on August 13 blocking Roundup Ready sugar beets is of a kind the USDA should have thought of itself a decade and a half ago when it first “assessed”, and subsequently approved, Roundup Ready crops such as soybeans and corn. No EIS was required at the time – and the consequence is what American farmers have to struggle with today: A widespread resistance of the leading weeds in North and South America against Roundup, the herbicide considered a silver bullet and Monsanto’s gift to agriculture for so many years. We last reported on this only recently when Monsanto’s local paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ran the headline Roundup’s Potency Slips, Foils Farmers.

Comment by TraceConsult™: So American farmers have come to realize that Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is “a serious, serious problem”. And a Monsanto spokesman recognizes publicly that his company could have provided some more “education” to the agricultural industry in the early Roundup years 15 years ago. To top this all off, a Midwest farm bureau official tries to explain it all away by pointing out the temptation emanating from the herbicide’s ease of application that “lulled” farmers “into complacency”.

For a full decade and a half, everyone in the U.S. involved in agriculture, starting from the farmers themselves, including big agri-business and even the agricultural attachés in U.S. Embassies worldwide, have declared European consumers as well as politicians and industry officials heeding consumer preferences half-witted for rejecting GMOs. Meanwhile, neither American nor foreign scientists warning USDA officials had a chance of having their concerns heard.