Emergency warning! Pathogen New to Science Found in Roundup Ready GM Crops?

An open letter appeared on the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance website founded and run by Judith McGeary to save family farms in the US. The letter, written in February by Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University, to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, warns of a pathogen “new to science” discovered by “a team of senior plant and animal scientists”. Huber says it should be treated as an “emergency’’, as it could result in “a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies.”

The Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) and Dr. Mae-Wan Ho warn, "This could be the worst problem yet to be seen with genetic engineering. Scientists have been warning for years about the unintended creation of new pathogens through assisted horizontal gene transfer and recombination. This new plant pathogen in Roundup Ready GM soybean and corn may be responsible for high rates of infertility and spontaneous abortions in livestock and a threat to human health."

Yikes, of course i hope this story turns out not to be true, but there are dozens of sites running similar versions of it. Its veracity follows logically from our human hubris even in the face of our obvious ignorance about the 'collateral' and downstream effects of our follies. Only money matters, any quackery or flim flam that can seemingly side step the laws of nature are used by the capitalists to inflate their quarterly profits.

In a sane and moral world the Precautionary Principle, which has been simply stated as: "When human activities may lead to morally unacceptable harm that is scientifically plausible but uncertain, actions shall be taken to avoid or diminish that harm" (UNESCO), would abolish GMO use. But not so much here on planet earth where the planet's plunder continues in the name of progress, where in the short term greed rules, but where in the long term nature bats last.