Monsanto and GM approval

Or how Genetically Modified (GM) crops came to market in the USA.
The following is hard to believe if one is naive.
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All to easy to believe if one has ever been around such humans.
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So here is the story of how the the FDA was high-jacked to promote GMO's.
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In the US, new food additives must undergo extensive testing, including long-term animal feeding studies.
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There is an exception, however, for substances that are deemed "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS).
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GRAS status allows a product to be commercialized without any additional testing. 
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According to US law, to be considered GRAS the substance must be the subject of a substantial amount of peer-reviewed published studies or equivalent.
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And there must be overwhelming consensus among the scientific community that the product is safe.
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GM foods had neither. 
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Nonetheless, in a precedent-setting move that some experts contend was illegal, in 1992 the FDA declared that GM crops are GRAS as long as their producers say they are. 
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Thus, the FDA does not require any safety evaluations or labels whatsoever. 
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A company can even introduce a GM food to the market without telling the agency.
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Such a lenient approach to GM crops was largely the result of Monsanto's legendary influence over the US government. 
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According to the New York Times, What Monsanto wished for from Washington, Monsanto and, by extension, the biotechnology industry got. . . . 
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When the company abruptly decided that it needed to throw off the regulations and speed its foods to market, the White House quickly ushered through an unusually generous policy of self-policing. 
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According to Dr. Henry Miller, who had a leading role in biotechnology issues at the FDA from 1979 to 1994, 
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In this area, the U.S. government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do.
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The person who oversaw the development of the FDA's GMO policy was their Deputy Commissioner for Policy, Michael Taylor, whose position had been created especially for him in 1991. 
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Prior to that, Taylor was an outside attorney for both Monsanto and the Food Biotechnology Council. 
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After working at the FDA, he became Monsanto's vice president. 
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He's now back at the FDA, as the US food safety czar.
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Covering up health dangers
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The policy Taylor oversaw in 1992 needed to create the impression that unintended effects from GM crops were not an issue. 
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Otherwise their GRAS status would be undermined. 
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But internal memos made public from a lawsuit showed that the overwhelming consensus among the agency scientists was that GM crops can have unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. 
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Various departments and experts spelled these out in detail, listing allergies, toxins, nutritional effects, and new diseases as potential problems. 
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They had urged superiors to require long-term safety studies.
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In spite of the warnings, according to public interest attorney Steven Druker who studied the FDA's internal files, References to the unintended negative effects of bioengineering were progressively deleted from drafts of the policy statement (over the protests of agency scientists).
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FDA microbiologist Louis Pribyl wrote about the policy, What has happened to the scientific elements of this document? 
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Without a sound scientific base to rest on, this becomes a broad, general, "What do I have to do to avoid trouble'-type document. . . . 
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It will look like and probably be just a political document. . . . It reads very pro-industry, especially in the area of unintended effects.
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The FDA scientists' concerns were not only ignored, their very existence was denied. 
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Consider the private memo summarizing opinions at the FDA, which stated, The processes of genetic engineering and traditional breeding are different and according to the technical experts in the agency, they lead to different risks.
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Contrast that with the official policy statement issued by Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney
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The agency is not aware of any information showing that foods derived by these new methods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way.
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On the basis of this false statement, the FDA does not require GM food safety testing.
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Natural News