GM crops: ‘Point of no return in ten years’

Scotsman.com | Jun 28, 2007

by SYBILLE DE LA HAMAIDE

EUROPE will increase its genetically modified (GMO) crop area by 50,000-100,000 hectares a year over the next decade, US biotech giant Monsanto has said.

“It will be slow but within ten years GMOs will have reached the point of no return,” said Jean-Michel Duhamel, Monsanto’s director for southern Europe.

“The technology will not impose itself on consumers but consumers will better understand the usefulness of GMO technology as farmers increasingly adopt it,” he added.

In France, the world’s largest seed maker, GMO maize – the only biotech crop allowed in the country – was expected to be grown on 600,000 hectares in ten years, against 25,000 in 2007, despite fierce opposition to GMOs in the country.

“It is more complicated in France than elsewhere but if we reach a 50 per cent rise (in area) per year it wouldn’t be bad, as at world level we expect it to rise 20 per cent,” Duhamel said.

French consumers are well known for their scepticism, if not hostility, to GMO crops. “Within the next few years there will likely be some turbulence,” Duhamel said. “Consumers receive false information on what GMO crops are so they are afraid. But I’m sure that within ten years they will have accepted them.”

This year, French farmers have sown 25,000 hectares of special maize, which has been modified to resist insect pests.

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Big Brother Insanity: Cameras Watching Cameras

Does this mean they will need even more cameras to watch the cameras that are watching the cameras, that are watching the cameras, that are watching th………….?????

Haha! You are right. It is a big joke, but what it points to is a more serious issue. Who is watching the Watchers?

PW

RINF Alternative News | Jun 27, 2007

By Mick Meaney

The surveillance society is not just content to watch all of us, everywhere we go, but is now considering the monitoring of its own cameras, as members of the general public rebel against the dramatic increase of these privacy eroding systems – by destroying one of the most despised surveillance methods in the UK, the speed camera.

Vandals, freedom fighters or patriots, you decide, have been targeting speed cameras near the Scottish border along the A68, the A1 and the A697 in Berwickshire. Seven attacks in three years have officials and Big Brother supporters worried.

Colin McNeil, head of the Lothian & Borders Safety Camera Partnership, the company who manage the cameras said: “Every time it happens it is inconvenient, it is costly and it is a crime. It is obviously something that we are concerned about to such a degree that we are now looking at potential ways of monitoring sites.”

“There are companies there who would provide us with CCTV coverage of the cameras themselves – the cameras looking after the cameras kind of thing.”

The logical step in a democracy would be to remove the cameras instead of spending even more of the taxpayers’ money to replace them, as the message has clearly been sent that this form of surveillance is not acceptable.

However the authorities are continuing to advance the nationwide surveillance of drivers by taking technology to new levels with the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system, which feeds vehicle and driver information into the Police National Computer database, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database and insurance databases.