January 21, 2010

Trails of the Triffid

"If you're going to play around with [genetically modified] crops, once the genie's out of the bottle, once it's in the environment, you can't control it,"

"Mysteriously, Triffid has reappeared in commercial crops".


Flax is mainly self-pollinated but around five percent of pollination occurs through insects. There are no prolific wild relatives in Canada that cross with flax.
Yet it spreading through the prairies and ending up overweight in the inspector's samples, and in organic fields? Like transgenic corn in Mexico, flax has been prohibited and yet contamination is widespread and significant in both countries, both crops. Is this a covert policy to slip in genes in the genome and win compliance with inevitability of its spread?


Alan McHughen (read about him in Brewster's Kneen's book Farmageddon, which if you cannot find in your library is available here www.ramshorn.ca. McHughen is the designer of the GMO flax and apparently promoted his book with a big mail out of packages of Triffid flax.

And then there is this:

GRAIN COMPANIES EXPLOIT FLAX SITUATION TO
TIGHTEN VISE ON FARMER SEED SAVING
SASKATOON, SK—Grain company Viterra wants to force all farmers wishing to grow flax in 2010 to purchase certified seed. A Viterra spokesman delivered that message in a presentation on January 11 at the Crop Production Show in Saskatoon.
Viterra and others are pushing the requirement for certified seed as a purported solution to the problem of the Triffid contamination in flax shipments to Europe. Triffid is a genetically modified variety not approved in Europe. But the NFU believes that the proposed certified seed cure is the wrong one, and that there will be long-lasting and negative side effects.
“The best solution is to test the seed supply, both farm-saved seed and certified seed,” said NFU President and flax producer Terry Boehm. He continued: “It is false to simply assume that certified seed is safer than farm-saved. For one thing, it is almost certain that the certified seed system is the source of the Triffid contamination farmers are now facing. Furthermore, it has now been determined that two varieties of flax are contaminated with Triffid at the breeder seed level".

More from the NFU

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