Slashdot Mirror
China Rejects 545,000 Tons of US Genetically Modified Corn
hawkinspeter writes "The BBC is reporting that China has rejected 545,000 tons of U.S. corn that was found to contain an unapproved genetically modified strain. Although China doesn't have a problem per se with GM crops (they've been importing GM soybeans since 1997) — but their product safety agency found MIR162 in 12 batches of corn. 'The safety evaluation process [for MIR162] has not been completed and no imports are allowed at the moment before the safety certificate is issued,' said Nui Din, China's vice agricultural minister. The Chinese are now calling on U.S. authorities to tighten their controls to prevent unapproved strains from being sent to China after the first batch of corn was rejected in November due to MIR162."
Isn't this just things working as they should?
MIR162 is a Syngenta product... the company is Swiss...
In this case, it isn't really so much about "keeping the genie in the bottle," since they're quite alright with the genie in general. This is just about double-checking safety of a product and one country's industries not doing enough to respect another country's approval process by keeping the supply-chain neatly segregated.
Of course, the irony is that this sort of story usually happens the other way with China. e.g. Honey containing traces of pesticides of antibiotics approved for general use in China but not approved in the US.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Are you going to build a house out of Corn?
http://inhabitat.com/corn-waste-transformed-into-versatile-building-material/
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
All food is safety tested. Don't try to single out GMO's here.
In China you don't get executed for screwing up. You get executed for embarrassing the Party.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Not sure if troll or ignorant. Chinese empire is the oldest one on earth by far. No other civilization in our history survived as long as theirs.
The current Chinese "empire" is only about 60 years old. It replaced the one before that in the Communist revolution, which in turn replaced the dynastic empire of ancient China 40 years before that. The current government has about as much connection to that ancient empire as modern day Egypt does to the pyramid builders, so if we're defining civilizations simply by their geography and demographics, the Egyptian civilization is actually older than the Chinese one by a thousand years or so.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Both of which have nothing at all to do with GMO plants and whether or not they have been rejected by any country in Europe. The citations are about bacteria and not plants. Good information but wrong topic