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30 April 2008

How to Fix the Food Crisis
Starvation in a Time of Record Profits

The Daily Green, 30 April 2008.

U.S. food companies are rolling in money while food riots roll through poor cities around the world.

The Wall Street Journal today reports on the massive profits of companies dealing in grain processing (high-fructose corn syrup, ethanol and others), fertilizers, genetically modified seeds, pesticides and other food- and farm-related products and services.

In the last quarter alone, the six most profitable companies in this sector have earned more than $4 billion. Here's how they might spend a bit of their windfall:

Those profits make the United Nations Food Program's emergency request for $755 million to feed the 73 million people at risk of starvation look tiny. It amounts to 20% of the profits from those companies over the last three months. And remember, these companies ‚ Monsanto, Cargill, Mosaic, ADM, Deere and Bunge ‚ have for the most part been raking it in for at least a couple years, as they ride (or is that drive?) the congressional mandate for ethanol. Food prices, according to one index, are up 57% in a year.

Meanwhile, the U.N. and World Bank have warned that a whole generation is at risk of malnutrition in some parts of the world as the "silent tsunami" claims lives, stunts growth and propels volatile countries into violence.

Here are the earnings of those companies in the last quarter, as reported by the Journal:

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Monsanto ‚ $1.13 billion

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Cargill ‚ $1.03 billion

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Mosaic ‚ $520.8 million

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Archer-Daniels-Midland ‚ $517 million

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Deere ‚ $369.1 million

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Bunge ‚ $289 million

[Photo caption: A man carries a sack of food through a Nicaraguan market. Nicaragua's food prices have shot up 48% according to the UN.]

USA: Farm Broadcaster Ousted after Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

Corporate Crime Reporter, April 30 2008.

If you have heard of Learfield Communications, it is probably from listening to college football and basketball games.

The Jefferson City, Missouri based Learfield is one of the nation's largest broadcasters of college sports.

But it also produces news programming heard throughout the farm belt.

Learfield was started 35 years ago by Clyde Lear and Derry Brownfield.

Lear went on to be the chairman of the company. He bought out his friend and partner Brownfield in 1985.

Brownfield went on to do market news reports for the Learfield news division until 1997 or so, when he started broadcasting a daily call-in show called The Common Sense Coalition.

Derry Brownfield would broadcast The Common Sense Coalition from the studios of Learfield Communications.

Learfield would subsidize the program and allow Brownfield to use its studios and satellite hook-up.

Monsanto happens to be a big advertiser of the Learfield news division ‚ to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Brownfield happens to think that Monsanto is an evil corporation.

Therein lies the rub.

For weeks, Brownfield had been ripping Monsanto on air for its policies of enforcing its seed patents against farmers.

On the April 16 show, Brownfield's topic was seed industry concentration in America.

His guests were Fred Stokes, president of the Organization for Competitive Markets, and Michael Stumo, general counsel of the group.

Stokes and Stumo were promoting a new project to study corporate concentration in the seed industry.

Monsanto is the dominant player in the global seed industry and has a reputation for playing rough.

On air, Brownfield quoted from a newly published Vanity Fair article titled "Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" by Donald Barlett and James Steele.

"Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country," Barlett and Steele write. "They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops, infiltrate community meetings, and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the 'seed police' and use words such as 'Gestapo' and 'Mafia' to describe their tactics."

After reading from the Vanity Fair article, Brownfield then begins to riff on the Mafia theme.

"Multinational corporations are doing everything possible to change agriculture ‚ and not for the better," Brownfield says on the show. "I know a little bit about this ‚ not a lot, just a little bit ‚ but Monsanto literally they have Mafia goons out, do they not? They show up on farmers' property, they try and harass them, they say if you don't sign this, we are going to take you to court. They have literally tried to destroy agriculture as we know it. They have a goon squad. Maybe that's not what they like to be called. But if it was the Mafia, we would call them the goon squad."

Calling Monsanto's patent enforcers goons was apparently the straw that broke this camel's back.

Brownfield's stint at Dearfield was about to end.

Last week, Brownfield was told that he could no longer broadcast out of the Dearfield studios. His buddy, Clyde Lear, posted a blog on the Learfield web site saying that Brownfield's last show will be in mid-May.

"The Common Sense Coalition grinds to a halt on our system," Lear wrote.

"Most of his listeners loved him as did his affiliates," Lear wrote about his buddy. "He didn't mind controversy or taking on giants like the Monsanto Corporation. He thought they were bad for farmers, too big for their britches and generally bad for America. Increasingly he's been saying so, without seeking balance, in my opinion."

And then later, in response to listeners who were upset that Brownfield was being let go, Lear wrote:

"Some seem to think the reason Derry is leaving is because Monsanto threatened to stop advertising if we didn't put a gag on him. If that were the only reason Derry was asked to leave, then I can see why they think we are selling out. We've parted ways because accusations being made about not only advertisers, but individuals, corporations, government, (fill in the blank) were based on fear and lies with absolutely no truth to back them up. I abhor radio talk shows like Rush Limbaugh...and Derry Brownfield where half-truths are articulated. I won't be a part of them. And, that's my right."

But in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter, Lear admits that the Monsanto issue is what drove his buddy Brownfield out.

"If the Monsanto issue had not come up, we would not be here today," Lear said.

Lear said that the President of Learfield Communications, Roger Gardner, talked recently with John Raines, Monsanto's director of public affairs.

"John Raines talked to Roger Gardner about the difficulties they felt Brownfield is giving them," Lear said. "(Gardner) told me he talked to John Raines about the Vanity Fair article."

"The pressure I got came from the president of the news division, Stan Koenigsfeld," Lear said. "Stan is the guy that has responsibility for selling and maintaining the financial viability of our news division. Stan is a no nonsense guy. So, Stan comes in and says ‚ why are we doing this? Why do we continue to do this? We give him all of these things and he spits in our face by lambasting our good advertisers, without giving them an opportunity for fair and balanced reporting. And it is not reporting ‚ it's just entertainment. Why do we continue to do this?"

Lear says that the complaints have been mounting over the past five years about Brownfield.

"And I've been saying to Stan, settle down, it will all be alright," Lear said. "But I imagine Stan is getting a lot of pressure from his sales executives. We have three that call on Monsanto for different products. And I would assume that he is getting pressure from those sales executives. When those sales executives call on Monsanto, Monsanto is complaining to the sales executives. That is where the connection happens. But you would have to talk to them about the kind of leverage Monsanto is putting on them. They have never to my knowledge threatened to pull any advertising."

Lear finally confronted Brownfield.

"I went to him and said ‚ Derry, look, lay off of this," Lear said. "Lay off of this Monsanto thing. I am getting a lot of complaints."

Lear said he was the only one in the company who could approach Brownfield.

"I'm the only one who can talk to him," Lear said. "No one else in the company will go to him. He is kind of persona non grata. He is one of the guys who helped start the company years ago. He was my partner for years until 1985 when I bought him out. He is a dear friend of mine. So, there is no one else ‚ all of the rest of the guys are half my age. They won't go to him. They are afraid of him. They just won't go and talk to him."

"They all came to me and said ‚ go talk to Derry," Lear said. "We've got to quit doing this. Plus, it came at a bad time. It came during the same week that the National Association of Farm Broadcasters national convention was being held in Kansas City. And at that convention, of course, Monsanto was omnipresent. They are there trying to woo farm broadcasters, because they want them to say nice things about them, right? So, here are all of the Monsanto people at this convention. And their advertising agencies ‚ Osborne & Barr out of St. Louis ‚ among others. They were all there. And it was embarrassing, because all of that week, Derry is lambasting Monsanto."

"We have explained to Monsanto, in any way we can, that the Brownfield Network has nothing to do with Derry's show," Lear says. "This is a completely independent show that he puts on. Well, Monsanto says ‚ he's doing it from your studios, isn't he? And we say yes, we give him space because of the history."

"And they ask ‚ how else do you help him? If he weren't doing the show, would this problem disappear?"

"So my guys came to me and said ‚ we've got to do something about this."

"So, I went in to Derry and I sat down with him," Lear said. "It was very good natured. I wasn't angry. I wasn't planning on doing anything. I said ‚ let this Monsanto thing go for awhile. Just let it go."

"He said ‚ 'Clyde ‚ Monsanto is an evil empire,'" Lear recalled. "'This is evil. He said ‚ every farmer hates Monsanto. You know what they have done ‚ and then he would lambast Monsanto and lay out this litany of stuff that they do. It included milk. Apparently there is a human growth hormone that they put in the milk. I don't know a thing about it, but apparently they won a court case that prohibited milk retailers from putting on the milk carton the label ‚ hormone free. I didn't know anything about this, but Brownfield was complaining about how the liberal judges of America are siding with the evil empire. And Monsanto pays them off. All kinds of allegations which I'm sure are not true. But Derry believes them."

"So, I said ‚ will you let Monsanto be on the air? And he said ‚ I'm not going to give them a forum. But then he changed his mind and said ‚ yeah, bring them on. I'll let them on the show."

Lear then went to hole up with his executives. And his execs told him ‚ "It's bigger than this now. We just don't need to be associated with him."

"So, I just walked back there and said to Derry ‚ you say you are not going to lighten up. And he said no, I'm staying the course. And I said ‚ not with us you are not. You are going to have to find some other way to distribute your program, and you are going to have to find some other office to do it out of."

Given that he was willing put Monsanto on his show, why not keep him on?

"Maybe we should have," Lear said.

Would you reconsider your decision?

"I don't think so," Lear says. "It is just not a business I want to be in anymore."

Lear says he feels sad about parting with his old buddy, but he wants to help set up an internet radio studio for Derry out of Derry's home office.

"We are helping him build a new facility in his home," Lear says. "But we won't have a connection to him. Then we can easily say to Monsanto ‚ we don't have a thing to do with Derry. We don't have a thing to do with him. He's not on our property. We can't control him."

Brownfield said he couldn't comment on the situation until after May 30.

Corporate Crime Reporter
1209 National Press Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20045
Tel + 1 202 737 1680

The public is proved right: GM crops are no panacea

The Guardian (UK), April 30 2008. By Tom Wakeford.

The IAASTD last week concluded that "data on some GM crops indicate highly variable yield gains in some places and declines in others". The door was left open, on the basis that it would be unwise to rule out GM crops for the future, but as the charity Practical Action commented, "the report rightly concludes that small-scale farmers and ecological methods provide the way forward to avert the current food crisis".

It's time many science policy-makers started eating GM humble pie, and urgent questions must now be raised about the lessons they have drawn from the GMO debate. With the exception of John Battle, every UK science minister and chief scientist since Labour came to power, together with media-friendly scientists and policy wonks, have assumed that the public "misunderstood the facts" in rejecting the current generation of GM crops. But in virtually every deliberative process undertaken the jury said no to GM crops.

Together with Andy Stirling, from the science policy research unit at the University of Sussex, I was involved in the first citizens' jury to discuss GM crops exactly 10 years ago. Its 1998 report concurs with the 2008 IAASTD findings. We've had 10 years and, I suspect, tens of millions of pounds, promoting transgenic crops as a solution for world hunger and sustainable agriculture - in the face of the balance of scientific evidence.

Some within government, though not the research councils, are still using the GMO debate, alongside the MMR controversy, in support of attempts to send us back to the dark age of the deficit model. The irrationality of this model, contrasting officially approved experts with mere lay people, is now beyond argument.

Completely preposterous arguments, such as those used to defend deficit thinking or that GM crops will feed the world, require unflinching faith. The previous chief scientist, Sir David King, seemed to think that most problems related to public trust in science could be solved by the application of the deficit model and his ethical code.

The funding councils are not without their deficit fans. They've even been known to support deficit fringe groups such as Sense About Science. Thankfully, wiser heads at the councils decided to set up the six Beacons for Public Engagement. Together, we have four years to show that researchers at universities can welcome those whose expertise comes from experience as co-producers of useful knowledge.

I wonder how many hunger-related deaths in developing countries could have been avoided if science policy-makers had applied this philosophy to GM crops 10 years ago?

Tom Wakeford is director of the Durham-Newcastle Beacon for Public Engagement. publicengagement.ac.uk

UN task force to tackle food price crisis

The Guardian (UK), 30 April 2008. By Julian Borger, diplomantic editor.

The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, Tuesday called for world leaders to attend a summit in June to tackle the food price crisis that has triggered global social unrest. In the run up to the summit in Rome, Italy, a U.N.Ý task force headed by a British diplomat, Sir John Holmes, will try to develop a coherent international response to the crisis, at a time of sharp international divisions over food exports, genetically modified crops and biofuels.

The plans for a task force and summit were announced at a meeting of the U.N.'s chief executive board in Berne, Switzerland, bringing together the U.N.'s humanitarian organizations with the world's principal financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

"We consider that the recent dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into an unprecedented challenge of global proportions that has become a crisis for the world's most vulnerable, including the urban poor," said a U.N. statement issued at the end of the Berne meeting. It called for donor nations to help the World Food Program (WFP) raise an additional $755 million (£380 million) to meet its existing food aid targets in the face of higher costs, and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) called for $1.7 billion to pay for seeds and inputs to help farmers in poor countries respond to the high prices by growing more.

The Rome summit, starting on June 3, had initially been planned by the U.N.'s FAO as an experts' meeting on the impact of climate change and biofuel production on global food security, but the dramatic increase in the price of staple foods such as rice, wheat and soya and the consequent food price riots in poor and middle-income countries around the world, has attracted the attention of world leaders.

France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, have confirmed their attendance. Downing Street said last night the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had no plans to attend.

In a letter earlier this month to Japan's prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, Brown had called for a coordinated response to the crisis from the G8 group of industrialized nations, due to meet this year in Japan.

Holmes told an audience at the London School of Economics on Monday: "Food insecurity is not like classic famines, such as Ethiopia. It's more insidious. It's been likened to a silent, rolling tsunami."

Sir John will have to navigate some deep divides on how best to respond to the crisis. While Britain and the U.S. argue that it gives added urgency for a new global agreement to liberalize trade, known as the Doha Round, being negotiated by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Some countries, including India and Thailand, have responded to food shortages and riots by curbing exports of staples. In recent days, France's agriculture minister, Michel Barnier, warned European Union officials: "We must not leave the vital issue of feeding people to the mercy of market laws and international speculation."

There are also heated debates over whether genetically modified plants are a possible solution to increasing yields, and whether the world should abandon the cultivation of biofuels, which have diverted land and other resources away from food crops.

Phillipines: Greenpeace refutes DA assurance on GMO rice

Inquirer.net, 30 April 2008. By Abigail Kwok.

MANILA, Philippines -- The Department of Agriculture (DA) is "uninformed" about the issue of genetically-modified organisms (GMO) in US rice imports, an international environmentalist group said Wednesday.

In a statement, Daniel Ocampo, Greenpeace Southeast Asia Sustainable Agriculture campaigner, said, "The DA was either lying or uninformed when it assured consumers that US GMO rice has the seal of approval of international food safety agencies. Contrary to the DA's claims, the GMO rice LL601 has not been approved anywhere in the world outside of the United States." DA issued a statement last Friday refuting the claim of Greenpeace that at least two brands of US commercial rice sold in public markets were allegedly contaminated by at least two GMO strains, one of which was LL601.

Greenpeace identified the two brands of US rice as Blue Ribbon Texas Long Grain and Rice Land Arkansas Long Grain. These brands were said to be sold in all S&R Supermarkets in Metro Manila. However, DA said that the two brands have yet to be shipped in the country. DA also said that the GMO strain LL601 was safe for consumption as certified by the US Food and Drugs Authority (USFDA).

But Greenpeace disputed this claim.

"Greenpeace knows that there have been no findings of safety of the GMO rice LL601 by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), nor the New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA), nor the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). And for the DA's own GMO regulators to claim the opposite is completely unbelievable. We are convinced this puts into question the DA's credibility, their honesty and integrity, with regard to GMO assessments," Ocampo said.

Greenpeace also questioned the DAís "suspicious lack of transparency" in the method used for testing rice for GMA strain. Ocampo said the lateral flow method used by DA to test rice imports was unacceptable.

"Using the lateral flow or strip test to determine GMO content is not an acceptable protocol for detecting LL601 or LL62 GMO rice under both the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and European Union standards," Ocampo said.

The environmentalist group is calling on the DA to regulate US rice imports in the country for GMO safety and to conduct a thorough testing of rice imports to ensure that they are GMO-free.

29 April 2008

UK: Politics of the plate: GM myths and raising meat standards

Gourmet magazine, 29 April 2008. By Barry Estabrook.

Debunking yet another GM myth

Those singing the praises of genetically modified (GM) crops often tout increased yields as one of the advantages to growing them. Two important studies say otherwise. Barney Gordon of Kansas State University reports in a recent issue of the journal Better Crops that his test plots of GM soybeans (which make up 90 percent of the soybeans grown in this country) produced 10 percent fewer beans than conventional crops. He suspects that the bioengineered beans do not absorb magnesium, an element essential to photosynthesis, as well as non-GM plants. An earlier study from the University of Nebraska produced similar results.

Higher yields is the second GM myth to be busted this year. Modified crops were also supposed to reduce the use of pesticides. But a report earlier this year by Friends of the Earth International showed that applications of glyphosate, an insecticide, and 2,4-D and atrazine, both herbicides, have increased dramatically in the United States in the dozen years since GM seeds were first sown in farmers' fields.

More good news...

...for those of us trying to eat animals raised and killed in a humane manner: The formidable Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production released a report this week calling for an end to intensive confinement practices on American farms. The list of unacceptable living quarters includes gestation crates for sows; veal crates; and battery cages for laying hens.

Commission members include such influential luminaries as former U. S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman; former Kansas governor John Carlin; and the former Dean of the University of Tennessee's College of Veterinary Medicine, Michael Blackwell. This is not a group of animal rights extremists, to be sure.

A few weeks ago, an act to ban confinement practices qualified for the ballot in California. Florida, Arizona, and Oregon have prohibited gestation crates. Arizona also disallows veal crates. Who knows, we may be catching up to the rest of the civilized world: The European Union has already legislated against the "Big Three" confinement abuses.

Better butchering

Grass-fed beef has a lot going for it. The cattle that produce it spend their days on pastures eating grass like they are supposed toóunlike feedlot cattle, which live in crowded pens for the last several months of their lives, stuffing themselves with corn-based feed (and a whole lot of drugs to counteract the ill effects of that corn, which isn't part of a cow's natural diet). But the differences between the two types of cows end at the last crucial stage of their lives. Due to a shortage of slaughterhouses, many grass-fed cattle are herded into trailers and trucked vast distances to the same large, inhumane, and dirty plants that process their industrially raised counterparts.

That may be changing. Two conscientious beef farmers on opposite sides of the country have opened their own slaughterhouses. In Bluffton, GA, White Oak Pastures, the state's largest grass-fed beef producer, has just completed its own on-farm plant, according to Sustainable Food News. The plant was designed by Dr. Temple Grandin, an expert on the humane treatment of animals. A similar facility was opened earlier this year by Sallie Calhoun, owner of Paicines Ranch, a grass-fed cattle operation in Benito County, CA.

In addition to handling the production from their owners' fields, both of the new boutique abattoirs will provide a valuable service to other small, local, sustainable growers, who until now had to truck their animals great distances, and whose output was not limited by demand (it's soaring) but by the capacity of processing plants.

UK: I'll have the cloneburger and fries

New Scientist, 29 April 2008. By Sharon Oosthoek.

Media and community opposition caused two cows born of a cloned mother to be withdrawn from auction in the UK. The use of cloned animals to produce meat and milk seems likely to cause as much controversy as the issue of genetically modified food. Stephen Sundlof, of the US Food & Drug Administration, says that even finding a theory about why food derived from clones could be unsafe is "beyond our imagination". Cloning could make it possible to produce animals resistant to illnesses such as mad cow disease. Utah State University's Kenneth White says the practice could also allow the production of healthier foods, such as meat with reduced cholesterol.

GMO: A Dangerous Experiment

OpEdNews.com, 29 April 2008. By Barbara Peterson.

The problems with Genetically Modified (GM) foods are as many as they are varied. Respected scientists have risked everything to step forward and warn consumers that this new fast-track "solution to world hunger" is bad for their health and the environment, but to little avail. Giant agri-business companies such as Monsanto forge ahead to flood the world's food chain with experimental technologies that are proving to be harmful to life. The worst part is, the longer this reckless experiment is allowed to go on, the closer we get to a complete planetary takeover by Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO).

The GMO Cover-upÝ

Dr. Arpad Pusztai, PhD, FRSE, "one of the few genuinely independent scientists specializing in plant genetics and animal feeding studies" (OCA, 2005), worked for the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1998. During his employment, he was commissioned to study potatoes "fitted" or genetically modified (GM) with a lectin gene from Galanthus Nivalis, a European plant. He inserted the gene into the potatoes himself, then fed the GM potatoes to lab rats in order to document the effects. What he found was that these potatoes had damaged the organs of the rats and depressed their immune systems. On August 10, 1998, Dr. Pusztai appeared on a British documentary and issued a warning to the public about the inadequate testing of GM foods, and revealed his test results. For his candor, Dr. Pusztai was accused of incompetence, and forced to retire.

A scandal ensued after Dr. Pusztai raised questions about the safety of GM potatoes. Accusations that Monsanto used its influence to ram the technology through with bribery and coercion were made, as chronicled by the Doric Column (1999):

•

12 February 1999: Twenty scientists from 14 countries who have examined Pusztai's report accuse Rowett of bowing to political pressure. The group calls for a moratorium on GM crops.

•

13 February 1999: The British government "rejects calls for a moratorium amid allegations that it is in the pocket of the biotech industry."

•

14 February 1999: Rowett is reported to have received £140,000 from Monsanto before the blow-up.

Dr. Pusztai was later "asked by the German authorities in the autumn of 2004 to examine Monsanto's own 1,139-page report on the feeding of MON863 to laboratory rats over a 90-day period" (OCA, 2005). He was forced to sign a "declaration of secrecy," or gag order before Monsanto would allow him to see the report.

This would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that Dr Pusztai's evaluation was highly critical of both the methods and the findings of the study, indicating that MON863 maize by no means has a "clean bill of health." Subsequent leaks from France, Germany and Belgium suggest that the maize variety may indeed be unsafe for animal or human consumption, and that a major cover-up is under way, designed to protect the corporate giant Monsanto and the regulatory authorities that have prematurely advised that MON863 is perfectly safe. (GM-Free Ireland, 2005).

His concerns regarding the dangers of MON863 maize after seeing the report were the same as several German and other European scientists, "but the German Government refused to publish their findings, and insisted that Dr Pusztai should respect his "gagging order"" (OCA, 2005).

Not to be held back in its rush to give the okay to GMO foods and the questionable technology behind them, The European Safety Authority commissioned its own set of experts to conclude that MON863 was perfectly safe and wholesome. More seriously, in the EFSA Statement, and in subsequent Monsanto press releases, Dr Pusztai was named and criticized in spite of the fact that it was known by all concerned that he was effectively "gagged" and could not defend himself. (OCA, 2005)

Independent Research Confirms - GMO Food is Dangerous

On October 10[2005], during the symposium over genetic modification, which was organized by the National Association for Genetic Security (NAGS), Doctor of Biology Irina Ermakova made public the results of the research led by her at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). This is the first research that determined clear dependence between eating genetically modified soy and the posterity of living creatures (Regnum, 2005).

Ý Over half of the rats born to mothers who ate GM-soy (55-56%) were dead in three weeks, as opposed to a 9% mortality rate in rats whose mothers ate normal soy. "The morphology and biochemical structures of rats are very similar to those of humans, and this makes the results we obtained very disturbing," said Irina Ermakova to NAGS press office. (Regnum, 2005)

Another glaring example of the dangers of GMO food is that of Syngenta and the German farmer, Gottfried Glockner of North Hessen. As William Engdahl explains in Seeds of Destruction,

This farmer found evidence that planting Syngenta Bt-176 genetically engineered corn to feed his cattle in 1997 had been responsible for killing off his cattle, destroying his milk production, and poisoning his farmland. Syngenta's Bt-176 corn had been engineered to produce a toxin of Bacillus thuringiensis, which they claimed was deadly to a damaging insect, the European Corn Borer (pg. 230).

GMO Technology Threatens the World's Food Supply

Not only is GMO food harmful to the animals that eat it, but it also has the potential to overcome the crops around it. Insects, birds, and wind carry seeds into neighboring fields and beyond. This is cross-pollination, and cannot be controlled in an outdoor environment. Genetically engineered plants are no exception to this. The pollen from GM plants can cross-pollinate with normal plants and contaminate entire fields. With the proliferation of GM crops, this is a real danger.

ÝÝ In 1996, there were approximately 6,563 square miles of farmland in the world devoted to GMO crops. In 2006, there were 393,828 square miles devoted to GMO crops (GMO Compass, 2007). This is a 5900% increase in land devoted to GMO crops in a 10-year period! At this rate, the amount of GM crops will double in the next ten years, not including cross-pollination factors.

Is "Organic" Really Organic?

Even foods labeled "organic" are allowed a percentage of GMO contamination.

"EU Agricultural Ministers have decided to allow organic food accidentally contaminated with genetically modified organisms to be classified as organic as long as the GMO presence is less than 0.9%" (Shield, 2007).

In the United States, "the US National Organic Program (NOP) rules prohibit GMOs in organics but don't require methods to prohibit GMO contamination or establish thresholds for adventitious GM presence" (Roseboro, 2007).

Many organic companies simply do not want to undergo the expense and effort necessary to test their fields for GMO contamination, but some say that it is essential in order to maintain integrity.

Jack Olson is an organic farmer in Litchville, North Dakota, who grows organic soybeans, wheat, and other crops. "It's hard for one organic farmer to fight Monsanto," he says.ÝStill, Olson puts up with the inconveniences because he is committed to organic agriculture. "At least we're clean, that's why we grow organic. It's God's way," he says. (Roseboro, 2007)

Fighting the Giant

It is difficult to fight the giant like Jack Olson is doing, but essential for health and the survival of our food supply. Scientists that are not afraid to speak out, and organic farmers that are not afraid to compete with companies such as Monsanto and offer customers GMO-free organic foods, stand between the agri-business giants intent on profiting from an improperly tested technology and the people who need the information and resources to make sure that what they are eating is healthy and nutritious. Without these people, the Monsantos of the world will soon have us eating nothing but their genetically engineered foods, with no thought for the consequences of their actions.

References:

Doric Column. (1999). Transgenic Potatoes ¡ La Carte.
http://www.mbbnet.umn.edu/doric/potato.html

Engdahl, F.W. (2007). Seeds of Destruction. Global Research.

GM Free Ireland. (2005). Monsanto GM Maize Conspiracy Revealed.
http://www.gmfreeireland.org/resources/documents/science/scandals/GMfreecymru1.php

GMO Compass. (2007). Transgenic Crops by Trait. GM Trait Statistics.
http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/agri_biotechnology/gmo_planting/145.gmo_cultivation_trait_statistics.html

Organic Consumers Association (OCA). (2005). Monsanto's GE Corn Experiments on Rats Continue to Generate Global Controversy
Ý http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/rats060205.cfm

Regnum. (2005). Genetically modified soy affects posterity: Results of Russian scientists' studies.Ý
http://www.regnum.ru/english/526651.html

ÝÝ Roseboro, K. (2007). How Organic is Organic? New Calls for Testing Organic Foods for GMOs. Environmental News Network.
ÝÝ http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/23152

Shield, P. (2007). GMOs Threaten Organic Standards. Organic Consumers Association (OCA).
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_5649.cfm

About the author:

Barbara H. Peterson is retired from the California Department of Corrections, where she worked as a Correctional Officer at Folsom Prison. She was one of the first females to work at the facility in this classification. After retirement, she went to college online to obtain a Bachelor's degree in Business, and graduated with honors. The most valuable thing she received from her time with UOP was a realization that her life's passion is writing. Now her business degree sits in her desk drawer, and she counts herself in the category of Writer/Activist. Someday she will make money writing, but that is not why she does it. "I do it because I must. A driving force compels me to reach out to others with what I learn about the condition we the people are in, and that is what I devote my time to. After all, time is the most precious thing we have, and the older I get the more I want to use it wisely." Barbara lives on a small ranch in Oregon with her husband, where they raise geese, chickens, Navajo Churro sheep, Oggie Dog, a variety of cats, and an opinionated Macaw named Rita. She believes that self-sufficiency and localization of food sources will be necessary to survive the coming depression. To this end, she has put up a website to share information at: http://survivingthemiddleclasscrash.wordpress.com. Her philosophy is this: You are on this earth for a reason - to fight for the light. Your words are swords that penetrate the darkness with truth and light. You have a purpose.

USA: American Apparel in drive for Cleaner Cotton

MR Magazine, 29 April 2008.

In an effort to expand its sustainable practices, T-shirt and casualwear brand American Apparel Inc has just purchased 30,000 pounds of Cleaner Cotton(TM) from California's Central Valley.

This cotton is farmed using fewer chemicals than conventional cotton cultivation, and also avoids the use of genetically modified seeds.

The Cleaner Cotton Campaign, which is led by The Sustainable Cotton Project, aims to keep toxins out of the soil, air and water by using biological techniques instead.

Erika Martinez, head of organic programs at American Apparel, said: "This unique program not only promotes the reduction of chemical use but it also assists farmers through the cultivation process." Ý

Last year, there 2,000 acres of Cleaner Cotton were grown, preventing 7,000 pounds of chemicals from entering the environment according to the California Environmental Protection Agency. Ý

American Apparel is a vertically integrated manufacturer, distributor and retailer of T-shirts and related products with nearly 200 stores in 15 countries.

All clothes are cut and sewn at its 800,000 sq ft facility in downtown Los Angeles.

UK: Pledge to keep cost of school meals down

Red Hill and Reigate Life, 29 April 2008.

SURREY County Council has said it will do its utmost to keep the cost of school meals down despite rising food prices. The increasing cost of staple food such as bread, eggs and rice, combined with pressure to provide more healthy schools meals, has led to fears that school dinner bills could soar.

Primary school children in Surrey pay £1.70 for a school meal while secondary schools charge £1.75. But some national newspapers have predicted the cost of meals could rise to £2 or more, costing parents more than £390 a year.

Surrey's head of commercial services, Beverley Baker, said: "Surrey County Council is working very hard to minimise the impact of this rise in costs and we do not intend to pass any cost increases on to parents."

The average price of a school meal last year was £1.64 including a subsidy of 43p. The Government also introduced extra national nutritional standards in September last year, putting further pressure on school dinner budgets.

Food provided by local authorities must include high quality meat and two portions of fruit and vegetables.

Controls on the amount of fried food served have also been introduced and fizzy drinks and unhealthy snacks have been removed from school menus and vending machines.

Surrey County Council has a number of measures in place, including a ban on mechanically recovered meat and genetically modified foods.

NPC panel: Chinese draft food law gets positive feedback

Xinhua, 29 April 2008.

BEIJING -- Chinese citizens have submitted nearly 5,000 comments on a draft food safety law, most of which praised the effort to make the law or urged tougher penalties and supervision, according to officials.

As of 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, the public had sent 4,838 comments through various means, according to the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee. The Standing Committee of the NPC released the full draft for public comment on April 20. It was posted on the national legislature website, www.npc.gov.cn.

Citizens making proposals all favored enacting the law, the commission said. They believed that the move demonstrated the policy of "putting the people first" and could ensure food safety and public health.

Some citizens made specific suggestions, for example, imposing tighter controls and penalties, clarifying food safety supervisory institutions' responsibilities and the government's role in financing food safety efforts, establishing uniform national standards and enhancing monitoring of small food processing workshops, according to the commission.

The definition of "food" should be specific and cover drinking water, edible oils, beverages, produce and meat, some suggested.

The food safety law should designate one department, instead of several, to be in charge of matters related to food processing including production, delivery and consumption, some proposed. These proposals noted that having several departments involved could lead to overlapping supervisory power and heavier regulatory burdens for the food industry.

Other submissions called for regular public updates on the monitoring and evaluation of genetically modified food.

Some citizens urged China to embrace international food regulations and replace numerous food standards with uniform ones.

The law should also ban food producers from using additives and enforce tight hygiene standards over staff in the food industry.

The draft law lays out penalties ranging from fines to life terms for makers of substandard food.

The comment period ends on May 20. Submissions will be delivered to the NPC Standing Committee for further study. A legislative schedule has yet to be set.

The draft law, covering food safety evaluation, monitoring, recall and information release, was submitted to the NPC Standing Committee last December for a first hearing.

EU: Brussels blames part of food price rise on US biofuels policy

EU Observer, 29 April 2008. By Leigh Phillips.

EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson has conceded that certain biofuel policies contribute to food price rises and increase greenhouse gas emissions, but that Europe's policies are sound.

Instead, Mr Mandelson has suggested that it is Washington's biofuels policies that are having these unwanted consequences.

"We can already see that large-scale biofuel production, especially in the US, may be one of the factors pushing up food prices as it diverts resources from food production," said the commissioner, writing in UK daily the Guardian on Tuesday (29 April).

"The race to grow maize for ethanol subsidies in the US reduces the supply of food crops on world markets and drives up the cost of this important staple," he continued.

EU leaders last spring agreed that the EU should increase the use of biofuels in transport fuel to ten percent by 2020, up from a planned 5.75 percent target to be achieved by 2010.

But in recent months the target has come under strong fire with critics saying it is contributing to further poverty in already poor countries as land is cleared for biofuel production.

According to Mr Mandelson, European biofuel production is having "only a minimal effect" on global prices.

Quoting the soundbite green NGOs have been using in their multiple campaigns against biofuels over the last year, the commissioner wrote: "There are enough corn calories in an SUV fuel tank to feed a person for a year."

No social criteria

But he warned that any consideration of social questions amongst the criteria for allowing imports of biofuels would have much wider consequences for Europe's trade agenda.

"Why should we suggest there is an obligation on producers who export sugar cane biofuel, but not on those who export plain sugar cane?"

A trade official told the EUobserver that social questions cannot be included because they "can't be defended that at the WTO," and "in any case, taken to it's logical extreme, we would have to ensure that everything we import, not just biofuels, meet social criteria," he said. "Do we want that?"

"We have to ensure our thoughts are known in other ways, such as pushing our trading partners to sign up to International Labour Organisation standards."

The commission's agriculture spokesperson on Tuesday echoed the criticism of Washington's biofuels strategies.

"It would be wrong to claim, and no one has ever claimed that people in America growing a lot of corn for ethanol does not have an effect."

Nonetheless, he said: "It is not for us to tell the US what strategies and policies to have."

However, not all the commissioners have been singing from the same song sheet. Last week, development commissioner Louis Michel criticised biofuels as a "catastrophe" for food prices.

For his part, commission president Jose Manuel Barroso recently called for a study on whether there is any relationship between the increased food prices around the world and biofuels.

GM crops will not produce miracle

Irish Independent, letter to the editor, 29 April 2008.

In his column 'If Ever The World Needed GM Food Production It's Right Now' (Irish Independent, April 23), Kevin Myers claims that, "GM will enable us to increase plant production, without greater use of fertiliser."

The cornerstone of modern science is that any claims must be based on empirical evidence.

While being passionate about his views, Kevin Myers offers no data in support of his assertion.

Pity he had not read an article entitled "Exposed: the Great GM Crop Myth", by Geoffrey Lean, the environment editor, in the [UK} Independent (April 30).

Lean reported on a study carried out during the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain-belt.

It found that GM soya produced 10pc less than its conventional equivalent. This contradicts the clam that GM technology increases yields.

Furthermore, last week the findings of a four-year study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology concuded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.

When Prof Bob[Watson, the director of the study and the chief scientist at the Deparment for environment, food and rural affairs in the UK, was asked whether GM crops could feed the world, he said: "The simple answer is no".

Fr Seán McDonagh
St. Columban's, Navan
Ireland.

USA: Emptying the Breadbasket
For decades, wheat was king on the Great Plains and prices were low everywhere. Those days are over.

Washington Post, 29 April 2008. By Dan Morgan.

At Stephen Fleishman's busy Bethesda shop, the era of the 95-cent bagel is coming to an end.

Breaking the dollar barrier "scares me," said the Bronx-born owner of Bethesda Bagels. But with 100-pound bags of North Dakota flour now above $50 -- more than double what they were a few months ago -- he sees no alternative to a hefty increase in the price of his signature product, a bagel made by hand in the back of the store.

"I've never seen anything like this in 20 years," he said. "It's a nightmare."

Fleishman and his customers are hardly alone. Across America, turmoil in the world wheat markets has sent prices of bread, pasta, noodles, pizza, pastry and bagels skittering upward, bringing protests from consumers.

But underlying this food inflation are changes that are transforming U.S. agriculture and making a return to the long era of cheap wheat products doubtful at best.

Half a continent away, in the North Dakota country that grows the high-quality wheats used in Fleishman's bagels, many farmers are cutting back on growing wheat in favor of more profitable, less disease-prone corn and soybeans for ethanol refineries and Asian consumers.

"Wheat was king once," said David Braaten, whose Norwegian immigrant grandparents built their Kindred, N.D., farm around wheat a century ago. "Now I just don't want to grow it. It's not a consistent crop."

In the 1980s, more than half the farm's acres were wheat. This year only one in 10 will be, and 40 percent will go to soybeans. Braaten and other farmers are considering investing in a $180 million plant to turn the beans into animal feed and cooking oil, both now in strong demand in China. And to stress his hopes for ethanol, his business card shows a sketch of a fuel pump.

Across the Red River and farther north, in Euclid, Minn., Don Strickler, 63, describes wheat as "a necessary evil." Most years, he explained, farmers lose money on it. Still, it provides conservation benefits and can block diseases in soybeans and sugar beets when rotated with those crops.

Wheat's fall from favor, little noticed when it was cheap, has been long coming. Though still an iconic symbol of American abundance -- engraved on currency and praised in song -- the nation's amber waves of wheat have been increasingly shoved aside by other crops. The "breadbasket of the world," which had alleviated hunger and famine since World War I, now generally supplies only a quarter of world wheat exports.

U.S. farmers are expected to plant about 64 million acres of wheat this year, down from a high of 88 million in 1981. In Kansas, wheat acreage has declined by a third since the mid-1980s, and nationwide, there is now less wheat in grain bins than at any time since World War II -- only about enough to supply the world for four days. This occurs as developing countries with some of the poorest populations are rapidly increasing their wheat imports.

Driving south from Grand Forks, N.D., on a freezing spring day, a motorist travels through a landscape that looks like a scene from the movie "Fargo." Mile after mile, fence posts rise from the snowy fields on each side of the ruler-straight highway. It looks like classic wheat country. But come summer, much of it will turn green from corn and beans.

"Last summer it looked like Iowa around here," Braaten said.

Science, weather, economics and farm policy have all played a part in the changes.

U.S. wheat yields per acre have increased little in two decades, partly because commercial seed companies have all but abandoned investments in improved varieties, preferring to focus on the more profitable corn and soybeans. Subtle warming changes in the climate and the recent availability of new plant varieties that thrive in cold, dry conditions have pushed the corn belt north and west.

In 1996, Congress gave a strong nudge to these changes by passing legislation allowing wheat growers for the first time to switch to other crops and still collect government subsidies. The result is that farmers received federal wheat payments last year on 15 million acres more than were planted.

"Every year now, we're in a battle for acres," said Neal Fisher, administrator of the North Dakota Wheat Commission. "We have a lot on our plates as we try to manage the challenges that wheat faces."

"If our comparative advantage is corn and soybeans and Russia's is wheat, having these shifts occur over time is not the end of the world," said Edward W. Allen, a senior economic analyst at the Agriculture Department.

But in the long run, said USDA wheat analyst Gary Vocke, "The forces leading to the trends are still in place." Though supplies may rebound, he and other experts doubt that prices will drop to prior levels.

That poses serious concerns for countries that historically have counted on the United States to have inexpensive wheat on hand to cushion shocks.

A Run on American Grain

The U.S. government stopped holding large stocks of wheat in the 1980s, but the United States, nearly alone among wheat producers, allows countries to shop here even when others have shut off exports.

This free-trade policy resulted in a run on the 2007 U.S. wheat crop this year by foreign buyers taking advantage of the favorable dollar exchange rate to stock up, even as Ukraine, Argentina and Kazakhstan blocked exports.

"It was a perfect storm," said Jochum Wiersma, a grains specialist with the University of Minnesota.

Problems started last summer with poor European harvests and a disappointing winter wheat crop in the southern Great Plains. U.S. prices moved above $7 a bushel, then crossed $10 after Australia harvested yet another drought-damaged crop in December. As supplies of wheat ran low, foreign countries began grabbing limited stocks of premium wheat from the northern plains -- the variety used to make the flour for Fleishman's bagels. Morocco, its own harvest of wheat to make traditional couscous inadequate, jumped in with a purchase of 127,000 tons.

"With low stocks and a weak dollar, things fly off the shelf faster than they used to," said David Brown, chairman of the American Bakers Association's commodity task force. "There's just not enough acreage coming back into production to replenish these stocks."

The reverberations were felt from Strickler's farm to Fleishman's shop -- and far and wide across world wheat markets. When Strickler checked his records recently, he found he had sold 850 bushels, about a truckload, for a record $20 a bushel. That's a receipt he plans to frame and hang on his wall.

But the same events put a squeeze on Vance Taylor, general manager of North Dakota Mill, the huge state-owned flour mill that looms over Grand Forks. Taylor's mill processes the spring-planted wheat grown along the Canadian border and prized by bakers of bread, bagels and other premium flour products. This spring wheat is high in protein and gluten, which helps breads rise and imparts texture. Among the mill's products are the bags of Dakota King flour that Fleishman uses to give his bagels their special chewy quality.

Suddenly Taylor couldn't find enough wheat. On Feb. 4, the state's Industrial Commission, headed by the governor, approved a rare waiver allowing the mill to buy spring wheat from Canada if needed. But in late March, the commission rescinded the waiver, which was highly unpopular with U.S. farm organizations. That left Taylor with a shortage of 1 million bushels before the August harvest. Since then, he said, he has found enough domestic wheat to get him through.

But prices rose rapidly down the supply chain.

"We raised our selling prices after the flour mills raised theirs," said Ted Lentz, president of Lentz Milling of Reading, Pa., which distributes North Dakota flour to bakeries from New York to Virginia. "Some of our baking customers have reduced their flour purchases up to 20 percent because of the higher prices."

A Return to Wheat?

Whether 2008's high prices will lure many farmers back to wheat is still a matter of debate.

The ethanol boom, in particular, is providing strong incentives to keep former wheat acres in corn. Within a year, Braaten will be able to truck his corn to three modern ethanol refineries, one already built and two others near completion. These huge distilleries will need corn from an area about the size of Rhode Island, and many of the acres will come at the expense of such traditional crops as wheat and sugar beets.

Corn has even begun to make inroads in the western part of the state, where sparse rainfall and the short growing season traditionally have ruled out most crops except wheat, barley and oats. Spurred by the availability of cheap coal for power and a local cattle industry that will buy the dry byproducts for feed, a new ethanol plant opened last year in Richardton, west of Bismarck, the capital.

"There's getting to be more and more corn all the time," said Clark Holzwarth, the refinery's commodity manager.

At current prices, farmers like Braaten can make more money from an acre of corn than from an acre of wheat, according to North Dakota State University economist Dwight Aakre. But wheat's biggest problem is susceptibility to disease, which has turned many farmers against it.

They remember the 1990s, when fusarium head blight, commonly called "scab," devastated successive wheat crops. After that, many farmers switched to new varieties of hybrid corn and genetically modified soybeans.

These seeds are protected by patents and licensing agreements, requiring farmers to buy a new batch each year. That produces strong financial incentives for the companies.

Research might solve many of wheat's problems, but commercial companies say the opportunities for profit are limited. In 2004, Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, shelved its research on a wheat plant that had been genetically modified to tolerate chemical weed killers.

The milling industry has been resistant to using such genetically modified wheats, so wheat plants have to be improved the old-fashioned way, by laboriously selecting those with the desired qualities in test plots. That is an expensive and time-consuming process.

Even then, there is no assurance that farmers will buy the seed year after year. That is because of the nature of the wheat plant, an unusually complex organism originating in the Middle East thousands of years ago. Unlike hybrid corn, which loses its productivity after the first year, seeds from improved wheat varieties can be saved and replanted for several years without significant loss of yield.

Syngenta, a large seed company, is still working to develop improved wheat, but Rob Bruns, who heads the North American cereal seed operation, acknowledged that it's difficult to create "enough critical mass to pay for the higher tech investments."

The upshot is that most wheat research is now consigned to public colleges with limited amounts of federal and state funds.

At North Dakota State University, wheat breeder Mohamed Mergoum helped develop Glenn, a new wheat based on a cross with Chinese plants. "It's a joy to make a difference in the life of the growers," said Mergoum, who worked earlier in the international program that developed higher-yielding "green revolution" wheats.

Glenn has proved resistant to scab, but it hasn't achieved universal acceptance among farmers.

Strickler, the farmer in Euclid, Minn., gave it a try one year but stopped using it after finding that a lot of the kernels cracked when they were separated from the chaff during threshing. As he sees it, Glenn is another example of how devilishly difficult it is to develop positive new traits in wheat without other problems arising.

James A. Anderson, a plant breeder at the University of Minnesota, predicted that the seed companies will continue to make inroads in wheat country with new kinds of corn and soybeans.

"They've definitely moved into the spring-wheat region with dedicated breeding," he said. "They're trying to get whatever acreage they can and sell more of their seed."

These developments suggest that the days of a bagel for less than a buck may not return to Bethesda anytime soon. Though prices have dropped from their March high, Fleishman is still paying close to $50 for a bag of flour.

"I feel helpless. I go with the flow," he said recently at his store. He is getting ready to change his menu boards to reflect a new price: probably $1.10.

He is not happy about it. "There's a psychological barrier, and a certain segment will be resentful," he said. "They'll get angry and feel gouged. People don't understand about food prices."

Morgan writes for The Washington Post on contract and is a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a nonpartisan public policy institution. Staff writer Jane Black contributed to this report.

Kenya: Harsh Weather Patterns to Shrink Maize Production

Business Daily/All Africa Global Media, 29 April 2008.

Kenyans could soon be forced to adjust their eating habits as the favourite maize meal becomes more scarce due to the effects of climate change.

Options include sorghum, millet or cassava, unless scientists unveil maize varieties that can mature faster under reduced rainfall and rising temperatures.

The climate change, which has been informed by excess emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, has led to irregular rainfall and a rise in temperatures in Kenya.

With a huge fraction of Kenya's agricultural activities pegged on rainfall, experts have raised the red flag that the country was facing dwindling output from rain-fed agriculture with the maize crop set to bear the brunt.

"If measures are not taken to develop highly drought resistant maize variety, production will drop significantly in the next 10 years," says Lilian Njeri, a maize breeder at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI).

Local scientists are predicting that temperature in Kenya will rise by two degree centigrade in the next 25 years. This means arable land will become drier.

But a lot has already been happening in the last 20 years. For instance, in Muguga, a high rainfall area in Kiambu District, changing climate is taking its toll on production with farmers shifting to other crops.

The area is located at an altitude of 2095 metres above the sea level. In the last 20 years, potatoes were one of the favourite crops for farmers like James Waruinge.

"The yield from potatoes has gone low. The crop is also vulnerable to diseases, some of which are new. I used to grow two acres every season for sale but bow I have shifted to maize," said Mr Waruinge.

Ms Njeri says it is not the farming methods that have changed but the climate such that potato seeds available cannot withstand weather changes.

In Muguga, residents used to grow maize varieties known as Hybrid 6, which were developed for high altitude and high rainfall fed areas.

"But now, farmers are coming to us asking for high altitude low rainfall fed varieties. The weather patterns have changed and are still changing," she said.

So, the situation is such that farmers in Muguga have opted for maize breed known as Hybrid 5 Series, which were originally developed for drier places like Ukambani, in Eastern Province.

The only consolation for Kenya today is a maize breed known as Hybrid 6 14, so far the most popular breed of maize because it adapts to various weather conditions, its yield is stable and it is sweet.

But the maize variety takes longer to mature, about 8 months, meaning it can only grow for a season per year.

But in unfavourable weather conditions, the maize can grow in six months but the yield becomes lower.

Breeders at KARI say they are in the process of developing a maize breed which can take four months to mature in places like Muguga.

"Before we give up on maize, however, we should work on developing a variety that is highly adaptive to drought," said Ms Njeri. Most maize breeders in Kenya are using the conventional breeding method, which does not involve genetic modification of the seed.

But the options are limited because one of the proposals being considered is to get a gene from a crop which is drought resistant and then introduce it to maize.

However, it is regarded as genetic engineering, which is not allowed by Kenyan laws.

A Bill to regulate development of new crop breeds through genetic modification, popularly known as GMO, is yet to be passed by Parliament.

The Bill has caused a lot of controversy with strong opposition from farmers groups, faith based organisations and the civil society.

Despite the opposition, scientists who spoke to Business Daily and requested not to be named said they believe the best way to deal with food shortage occasioned by global warming is to go the GMO way.

28 April 2008

UK: Science friction
The Daily Telegraph looks set to lose its science correspondent amid growing fears about standards of science reporting in the press. Iain Hollingshead reports

The Guardian, Monday April 28 2008. By Iain Hollingshead.

[Extract only. For full story see http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/28/dailytelegraph.pressandpublishing.]

...Yet there are still a disquieting number of contemporary voices suggesting that all is is not well with science journalism. "Science in the daily media is too often reported in the same deferential way as political journalists used to report politics in the 1950s," says Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor at the Sunday Times. "Many of the tensions, rows and skulduggery in the science community get far less attention than they would in business or politics." The main criticism is that respected journals such as Science and Nature - along with active news agencies such as AlphaGalileo, EurekAlert! and a plethora of less rigorous journals - control much of the science correspondents' output. An onslaught of embargoed, mid-week press releases leaves the Sundays with no choice but to pursue factually thin sensationalism.

USA: Nationwide Biotech Crop Maps Suggested for Monitoring Environmental Impacts

UC Davis, 28 April 2008.

A team of biologists, including a UC Davis plant scientist, is proposing that maps be created showing where all of the billion-plus acres of genetically engineered crops have been grown in the United States.

The comprehensive biotech mapping system, modeled after one now in use in Arizona, would permit much-needed studies of the positive or negative environmental impacts of genetically engineered crops, the researchers suggest in a Policy Forum piece published in the April 25 issue of the journal Science.

"Such maps would enable scientists to better analyze the effects of genetically modified crops on wildlife, water quality, insect pests and beneficial insects," said UC Davis Professor Paul Gepts, an expert on the evolutionary processes that have shaped the evolution of crop plants.

In Arizona, farmers routinely share maps of biotech cotton fields with scientists at the University of Arizona, enabling detailed analyses of the effects of this technology. That information is collected and stored in such a way that the privacy of the farmers is protected.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture already is collecting data at the individual farm level, but that information is only made available to researchers at the scale of entire states. In this forum piece, the authors maintain that such information needs to be made available at the county and township level in order to be useful in analyzing the impacts of biotech crops.

Lead author on this paper is Michelle Marvier of Santa Clara University. The other authors, in addition to Gepts, are Peter Kareiva of Santa Clara University and The Nature Conservancy, Norman Elstrand of UC Riverside, Yves CarriËre and Bruce Tabashnik of the University of Arizona, Emma Rosi-Marshall of Loyola University Chicago, and L. LaReesa Wolfenbarger of the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

USA: UCD researchers alter goats with human genes

Sacramento Bee, 28 April 2008. By Chris Brennan.

UC Davis professor James Murray knows his experiments with human genes and goats give some people the creeps.

Crossing anything human with four-legged hoofers evokes images of mythical half-man, half-animal centaurs from ancient Greece.

In reality, genetically altered goats look and behave no differently than regular ones -- both are just as eager to gnaw Murray's sleeves and untie his shoes at the university goat barn.

"Could you get your grubby paws off?" Murray asked of his inquisitive test subjects during a recent tour.

Murray and fellow animal scientist Elizabeth Maga engineered a small herd of Alpine and Toggenburg dairy goats to produce high levels of a human antibiotic-like protein in their milk.

Just as mother's milk helps protect infants from germs, the researchers figured, humanized goat's or cow's milk would better defend dairy animals and their offspring from illness. Germ-fighting milk might also slow spoilage, prolonging the shelf life of dairy products.

The big question

The scientists' ultimate question, though, is a humanitarian one:

Could the same procedure produce fortified powdered milk and, eventually, genetically modified goat herds for poor regions of the world?

The beneficial protein, lysozyme, destroys bacteria that cause intestinal infections and diarrhea, which every year claim more than 2 million impoverished young lives. That's a toll among children under age 5 higher than from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, according to the World Health Organization.

"If we can prevent some of that, I think we should do it," Murray said, mindful of long-standing protests from animal rights activists, ethical concerns and fears of messing with Mother Nature.

The goat's milk represents one of the first genetically engineered food products designed to improve human health, though none has been approved for human consumption.

Scientists have been manipulating animal genes for nearly 25 years. They've changed properties of milk for human food and as raw material for pharmaceuticals -- turning animals into virtual medicine factories. Murray himself has changed the genes of cows, sheep, pigs and mice.

The goat's milk experiments, however, are among the few to transfer human genes to animals, said Michael Fernandez, former director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology.

"It's certainly not the predominant practice right now," Fernandez said. Private biotechnology companies and universities usually obtain genetic material from microbes or plants, not humans, he said.

Concerns about technology

Sacramento's Ventria Bioscience is a prominent exception. The company is growing genetically altered rice that contains lysozyme and another antibacterial ingredient in human breast milk. The company aims to produce an over-the-counter rehydration solution made from the fortified rice.

Ventria recently found a place to farm their patented rice in Junction City, Kan., after running afoul of Sacramento Valley and Missouri growers who fear medical rice might mix with their grains.

Doug Gurian-Sherman, a biotechnology specialist with the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group, said he has similar concerns about transgenic goats.

Should the goats get into the wild -- their altered genes indeed make them more fit to survive -- they could more easily multiply and over-browse a landscape, threatening native species and causing erosion, he said.

"We don't have a regulatory system that addresses these kind of environmental issues in this country, let alone developing countries," Gurian-Sherman said.

Allergy protection

Why human genes for goats?

Goats, humans and all other mammals have lysozyme in milk, saliva and tears. Human breast milk, however, carries at least 1,600 times more than goat's milk.

UCD dairy goats born with the human gene that regulates lysozyme in mammary glands have far more lysozyme in their milk than they would naturally -- 67 percent of human levels compared with 0.06 percent, Murray said.

While other animals carry high levels of the protein, Davis researchers chose to inject the human gene to minimize chances of an allergic reaction, should people ever drink the modified goat's milk.

"You drink lysozyme every day in your saliva, so the chances of you reacting to it are pretty small," said Maga, a research biologist in the animal science department.

Several more studies are needed to satisfy food safety regulators in the United States and elsewhere that this medicinal milk would be safe to drink, researchers said.

The latest findings, published in the May issue of the Journal of Nutrition, show altered goat's milk helps fend off common E. coli-related illnesses in pigs, which have human-like digestive systems.

Pigs fed the lysozyme-rich milk from transgenic goats had significantly lower levels of harmful bacteria in their small intestines than those raised on regular goat's milk.

Dr. Miriam Aschkenasy, a public health doctor with the nonprofit humanitarian aid group Oxfam America, doesn't share Murray's optimism that the goat's milk would provide comparable protection for children.

While human breast milk is considered beneficial to infants, "there is, as far as I know, very little evidence that if you feed it to an older child these same affects apply," Aschkenasy said.

Said Murray: "The absence of evidence does not mean it isn't so, it just means we do not yet know. Hopefully studies with our transgenic goat's milk will help to answer this question."

The UCD Academic Federation Committee on Research funded the experiment with pigs. Murray is seeking additional funding from philanthropies interested in improving health in developing nations.

For the next experiment, Murray wants to see whether modified goat's milk not only prevents intestinal illness in pigs but also treats it.

"We'll make them sick and see if they get better," he said.

USA: Higher feed costs contributed to loss at Tysons

Reuters, April 28 2008 [shortened]

Chicago -- Tyson Foods, the largest U.S. meat company, on Monday posted a small loss for its fiscal second quarter due to higher feed costs and charges related in part to plant closings.

Tyson, like other livestock producers, has been hurt by the high price of corn and soybean meal. Corn prices have skyrocketed due to strong demand for exports, ethanol production and as a livestock feed.

"For the year, corn and soybean meal increases are likely to approach $600 million," Richard Bond, Tyson president and chief executive, said in a statement.

For full story see http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/28/business/28tysons.php

Australia: Petrochemical Replacement Plants Closer, Scientists Say

The Epoch Times, 28 April 2008.

CANBERRAóAustralian researchers say they are a step closer to turning plants into "biofactories" capable of producing oils which can be used to replace petrochemicals.

Biofactory plants could provide farmers with new, high-value crops bred to suit growing conditions, they say.

Scientists working within the joint CSIRO/Grains Research and Development Corporation crop biofactories initiative (CBI) claim a major advance by accumulating 30 per cent of an unusual fatty acid (UFA) in the model plant, Arabidopsis.

UFAs are usually sourced from petrochemicals to produce plastics, paints and cosmetics.

CBI is developing new technologies for making a range of UFAs in oilseeds, to provide Australia with a head start in the emerging so-called bioeconomy.

"Using crops as biofactories has many advantages beyond the replacement of dwindling petrochemical resources," CSIRO team leader Dr Allan Green said in a statement.

"Global challenges such as population growth, climate change and the switch from non-renewable resources are opening up many more opportunities for bio-based products."

The production of biofactory plants could be matched to demand and would provide farmers with new, high-value crops bred to suit their growing conditions, Dr Green said.

"The technology is low greenhouse-gas generating, sustainable and can reinvigorate agribusiness.

"We are confident we have the right genes, an understanding of the biosynthesis pathways and the right breeding skills to produce an oilseed plant with commercially-viable UFA levels in the near future."

The team is expected to announce the successful completion of the first stage of the CBI at a world biotechnology conference in Chicago today.

The selection of safflower as the target crop will also be announced by the team.

"Safflower is an ideal plant for industrial production for Australia," Dr Green said.

"It is hardy and easy to grow, widely adapted to Australian production regions and easily isolated from food production systems."

The CBI is a 12-year project which aims to add value to the Australian agricultural and chemical industries by developing technologies to produce novel industrial compounds from genetically modified oilseed crops.

World: Making a killing from the food crisis

A new report by GRAIN http://www.grain.org/2/?id=39, 28 April 2008.

The world food crisis is hurting a lot of people, but global agribusiness firms, traders and speculators are raking in huge profits.

Much of the news coverage of the world food crisis has focussed on riots in low-income countries, where workers and others cannot cope with skyrocketing costs of staple foods. But there is another side to the story: the big profits that are being made by huge food corporations and investors. Cargill, the world's biggest grain trader, achieved an 86% increase in profits from commodity trading in the first quarter of this year. Bunge, another huge food trader, had a 77% increase in profits during the last quarter of last year. ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, registered a 67% per cent increase in profits in 2007.

Nor are retail giants taking the strain: profits at Tesco, the UK supermarket giant, rose by a record 11.8% last year. Other major retailers, such as France's Carrefour and Wal-Mart of the US, say that food sales are the main sector sustaining their profit increases. Investment funds, running away from sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, are having a heyday on the commodity markets, driving prices out of reach for food importers like Bangladesh and the Philippines.

These profits are no freak windfalls. Over the last 30 years, the IMF and the World Bank have pushed so-called developing countries to dismantle all forms of protection for their local farmers and to open up their markets to global agribusiness, speculators and subsidised food from rich countries. This has transformed most developing countries from being exporters of food into importers. Today about 70 per cent of developing countries are net importers of food. On top of this, finance liberalisation has made it easier for investors to take control of markets for their own private benefit.

Agricultural policy has lost touch with its most basic goal: that of feeding people. Rather than rethink their own disastrous policies, governments and think tanks are blaming production problems, the growing demand for food in China and India, and biofuels. While these have played a role, the fundamental cause of today's food crisis is neoliberal globalisation itself, which has transformed food from a source of livelihood security into a mere commodity to be gambled away, even at the cost of widespread hunger among the world's poorest people.

The angry hungry

The Guardian online, April 28 2008.

The food crisis is no 'silent tsunami': the world's poor have been making a noise for decades, but the development industry hasn't been listening

If Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations World Food Programme, is to be believed, the current food crisis is "a silent tsunami which knows no borders, sweeping the world".

That's just wishful thinking.

If the tsunami were really silent, then it'd be much easier for cretins to propose trade liberalisation as a remedy, or for Gordon Brown to support genetically modified crops as a way of responding to the disaster.

If the tsunami were silent, these ideas would float unopposed and uncontested. Indeed, it'd be far more convenient for the governments and aid agencies involved if the catastrophe of hunger and poverty were silent, and especially if the hungry didn't keep piping up with their own ideas about what they'd like to see happen. But they do, and their ideas are often at odds with those proposed by the development industry.

If the tsunami were really silent, the fairytales of the international development cabal could be told in nothing louder than a whisper. In these stories, the world's poor people aren't very articulate, and it requires an almost magical skill to divine their needs. The poor like are puppies with tummy aches, whose mute suffering is knowable only to those trained in the art of looking into those big brown eyes and feeling their pain.

I should know. As a graduate student, I participated in just such an exercise for the World Bank as a contributor to a publication entitled The Voices of The Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us?

Billed as a way of "gathering the voices of 40,000 people from the Bank's own assessments", and favourably blurbed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the document is an attempt at an epistemological get-out-of-jail-free card, for no one knows the poor like the World Bank.

It is, of course, an execrable piece of work and one that gets savaged in a number of places, including here (by one of the report's other co-authors and me).

But the tsunami has been noisy for decades. Some of the poorest people on earth have been extremely vocal, ever since the dawn of modern development policies. Via Campesina, one of the world's largest movements of poor people with membership estimates as high as 150 million, has been warning of the dangers of handing over agriculture to the private sector ever since its inception in the early 1990s.

They've long been campaigning for things that aren't on the policy table at the moment - things like state-led land reform. Like grain stores and income support for the poor. Like equal access to natural resources. Like government investment to develop new and sustainable agro-agricultural technologies, as opposed to GM crops - a position recently vindicated by a venerable panel of experts at the IAASTD.

Above all, they demand democracy so that their voices might count. Those voices are articulate and audible. The International Day of Peasants' Struggle happened last week, with protests in over 60 countries, commemorating the massacre of 19 landless people by government forces in Brazil in 1996. Those protests were rich with ideas for food sovereignty.

But the voices have so far been ignored. The most common agricultural response to the demands of landless people and the hungry urban poor is for officials to plant their fingers in their ears.

Meanwhile, the private sector is rubbing its hands at the prospect that this crisis too might be an arena for them to practice a new brand of disaster capitalism.

The tsunami is loud and clear. Perhaps the global wave of food riots their policies have engendered will help to clear the soil out of the development industry's ears.

CSIRO: Compounds from oilseeds could be used to make plastics and other products. Boost for 'green plastics' from plants; Australian researchers are a step closer to turning plants into 'biofactories' capable of producing oils which can be used

Calibre MicroWorld, April 28 2008.

Australia -- Scientists working within the joint CSIRO/Grains Research and Development Corporation Crop Biofactories Initiative (CBI) have achieved a major advance by accumulating 30 per cent of an unusual fatty acid (UFA) in the model plant, Arabidopsis.

UFAs are usually sourced from petrochemicals to produce plastics, paints and cosmetics. CBI is developing new technologies for making a range of UFAs in oilseeds, to provide Australia with a head start in the emerging 'bioeconomy'.

"Using crops as biofactories has many advantages, beyond the replacement of dwindling petrochemical resources," says the leader of the crop development team, CSIRO's Dr Allan Green.

"Global challenges such as population growth, climate change and the switch from non-renewable resources are opening up many more opportunities for bio-based products." "Safflower is an ideal plant for industrial production for Australia," Dr Green, CSIRO Plant Industry Division.

The production of biofactory plants can be matched to demand and will provide farmers with new, high-value crops bred to suit their growing conditions. The technology is low greenhouse gas generating, sustainable and can reinvigorate agribusiness.

"We are confident we have the right genes, an understanding of the biosynthesis pathways and the right breeding skills to produce an oilseed plant with commercially viable UFA levels in the near future," Dr Green says.

The team will announce the successful completion of the first stage of the CBI on 28 April during the Fifth Annual World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology & Bioprocessing (WCIBB), being held in Chicago, Illinois, from 27-30 April 2008. The team's selection of safflower as the target crop will also be announced.

"Safflower is an ideal plant for industrial production for Australia," Dr Green says. "It is hardy and easy to grow, widely adapted to Australian production regions and easily isolated from food production systems."

The CBI is a 12-year project which aims to add value to the Australian agricultural and chemical industries by developing technologies to produce novel industrial compounds from genetically modified oilseed crops.

The project focuses on three key areas; Industrial Oils, Complex Monomers and Protein Biopolymers. CBI project leaders will present the latest research findings in each of these three areas at the WCIBB in Chicago which will showcase innovations in the convergence of biotechnology, chemistry and agriculture.

Download image at: Boost for 'green plastics' from plants.

Read more media releases in our Media Centre.

Fast facts

* The production of biofactory plants can be matched to demand and will provide farmers with new, high-value crops bred to suit their growing conditions

* The technology is low greenhouse gas generating, sustainable and can reinvigorate agribusiness

* The project focuses on three key areas; Industrial Oils, Complex Monomers and Protein Biopolymers

CONTACT: Dr Allan Green, CSIRO Plant Industry Tel: +61 2 6246 5154 Fax: +61 2 6246 5192 e-mail: Allan.Green@csiro.au Mrs Julie Carter, (BSc GradDipEd), Communication Manager, CSIRO Entomology Tel: +61 2 6246 4040 Tel: +61 4 3903 3011 Fax: +61 2 6246 4177 e-mail: enquiries@csiro.au

UK: A new era of food politics

National Farmers Union, 28 April 2008. By Katy Lee, BAB Parliamentary and Communications Coordinator.

The issue of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) is in need of urgent examination by the EU. This was the message pushed by MEPs at a debate in Strasbourg last week.

On behalf of the European Parliament's powerful Agriculture Committee Neil Parish MEP (SW, Cons) asked the European Commission to assess the consequences of GMO reluctance from the EU on international trade and animal feed prices. The EU's current GMO policy has been problematic because there are countries outside of Europe such as the US who have approved the use of GMO cereals such as varieties of maize and soya where the EU hasn't.

The slower pace at which the EU authorises GMO compared to the rest of the world is known as "asynchronous authorisations", it has caused problems in trade and in food availability because a small trace of US approved GMO in an export destined for the EU would mean the withdrawal of the whole batch.

Mr Parish suggested that a tolerance threshold might be the way forward for scientifically approved GMOs, in order to avoid further threats to EU grain supply and in particular to animal feed.

In the same Strasbourg session the EU Commissioner for Development, Louis Michel, said "We won't see food prices going back down to former levels".

27 April 2008

Is corn overplanting responsible for soaring food costs?

Athens Banner Herald (USA), April 27 2008. By David A. Ridenour.

WASHINGTON - Move over "Bridge to Nowhere," there's a new poster child of congressional waste and avarice - ethanol, the "Fuel to Nowhere." Ethanol leads only to higher food prices and greater greenhouse gas emissions.

Anytime Congress can find an excuse for shoveling out billions of dollars in pork, it's a safe bet there'll be a stampede of Democrats and Republicans to vote "Aye." Such has been the case with ethanol ever since Congress latched onto the idea that it could be sold as a means of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Congress already has authorized billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies for farmers who grow corn and the producers who turn it into the fuel that's pumped into your car.

Never mind that ethanol is helping spike food prices. Corn prices already have increased by 70 percent since 2005, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects they will rise an additional 10 percent to 20 percent this year.

But that's not the half of it. Corn-dependent livestock also are increasing in price. The USDA estimates that corn feed price increases added nearly 9 percent to the price of beef last year. But this doesn't include the indirect costs. U.S. beef cattle herds declined by 338,000 in 2007, increasing beef prices further, in part, due to higher prices for feed, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Ethanol advocates claim that rising corn costs have contributed only modestly to the overall increase in food prices. They're not being entirely honest, as they're only counting the direct costs of ethanol. They don't count, for example, increases in soybean prices resulting from farmers switching to the more lucrative corn crop. Soybean crops dropped by 11 million acres last year - much of it used to produce corn.

The corn growers and Big Agriculture, flush with new-found cash, have generously increased their campaign contributions, making everyone happy - everyone, that is, but consumers and taxpayers.

As the world begins to starve it's time to take GM seriously
With the Earth's population continuing to soar, it will be the poor who go hungry, not the eco-warriors destroying modified crops

The Observer (UK), Sunday April 27 2008. By Robin McKie.

As front pages go, the cover of Nature is scarcely a stunner. It depicts two rows of trees facing each other across the page. One row is tatty, the other clean and healthy. And apart from a few grubby bushes in the background, that's your lot. It makes a gardening catalogue look exciting.

But this restrained imagery rewards closer inspection. Those trees, bearing papayas, are growing in a Hawaiian plantation and the difference between the two rows has critical importance to the world's mounting food crisis.

It transpires that the stunted trees on the right, each bearing only a handful of fruit, are victims of papaya ringspot virus, a disease that devastates yields and is endemic in Hawaii. By contrast, the papaya trees in the other row, on the left, are healthy and disease-free, because they have been genetically modified to resist ringspot.

As a demonstration of the potential of modern plant technology, the image speaks volumes. Transgenic crops may be disparaged and dug up every time scientists grow them as part of their trials in the UK, but as Nature's cover shows, the technology seems ripe to help feed a planet whose population will rise from 6.5 billion people, many of them already hungry, to around nine billion by 2040.

It is a point stressed by crop experts such as Professor Chris Pollack of the University of Wales. 'To stop widespread starvation, we will either have to plough up the planet's last wild places to grow more food or improve crop yields. GM technology allows farmers to do the latter - without digging up rainforests. It is therefore perverse to rule out that technology for no good reason. Yet it still seems some people are willing to do so. That picture of transgenic papaya plants on Nature's cover shows how wrong they are.'

The trouble is that GM crops represent everything that the environment movement has come to hate, though it was not the technology itself that originally made greenies froth at the mouth. It was its promotion and marketing by international conglomerates such as Monsanto a decade ago that raised the hackles. As a result, GM crops have become a lightning rod for protests about globalisation. 'GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them,' claimed campaigner George Monbiot.

Perhaps he is right. However, it is questionable to go one step further and insist, as some campaigners do, that because GM technology has been misused by biotechnology conglomerates, it is therefore justifiable to ignore its usefulness completely. The science can still help feed the world, particularly through the introduction of drought and disease resistance to staple crops such as potatoes and rice. 'Britain and Europe have isolated themselves from the rest of the world over transgenic crops,' says Bill McKelvey, principal of the Scottish Agricultural College, in Edinburgh. 'We have decided the technology, for no good reason, is dangerous. The rest of the world doesn't thinks so and has got on with using it. For example, GM soya is grown throughout America and Asia. It doesn't worry people there for the simple reason that no one has ever died of eating GM food. On the other hand, a lot of people could soon die because they have no food of any kind.'

Tough luck, you might say. That's not Europe's problem. It's the developing world that will get it in the neck. Why should we care? What have we got to gain by turning to GM? These are interesting questions to which there are several answers and one of the most important concerns climate change.

The world is warming and is destined to do so for decades to come as cars, factories and power plants continue to pump out carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. As a result, many grain-producing regions - in North America, Australia and parts of Africa - are expected to suffer significant changes in climate that will devastate crop production. By contrast, other regions - northern Europe and Canada, in particular - will find weather changes will boost crop growing. They will become the world's food stores, an issue highlighted by Professor Les Firbank of North Wyke Research Station in Devon.

'Our best knowledge suggests Canada and countries in Europe will have to take on an even greater share of world food production,' he says. 'It is therefore important to ask now if we have the moral right to continue to ignore technologies, including the genetic manipulation of crops, that in a few years could insure this food production reaches an absolute maximum and will help the planet provide enough food for the nine billion people who will be living on it.'

Britain and many other European countries have considerable expertise in plant and crop biology research, it should be stressed. But that work is constantly frustrated. Crop trials are dug up and funding is blocked by governments embarrassed to be seen backing such work. The effects are rarely beneficial. Consider the example of potato blight. Its prevalence rose rapidly last year, threatening a crop that is a staple foodstuff for many people round the world.

Yet scientists insist it would be relatively easy to introduce a basic gene construct into potatoes that would make them resistant to blight. Europe has the expertise but is thwarted by gangs of men and women who trash GM crop fields. As Sir Robert May, the government's former chief scientific adviser, once remarked, these individuals display 'the attitude of a privileged elite who think there will be no problem feeding tomorrow's growing population'. May was speaking, with remarkable prescience, at the turn of the century.

This is not to say that transgenic crops alone will save the world from starvation. Major improvements in transport, which will allow fresh food to be taken to market without rotting, are needed, for example. Simply bringing political stability to a country would also help. 'Zimbabwe's food problems won't be helped through GM crop technology,' admits McKelvey. 'It needs a political solution. Nevertheless, the technology has a key role to play in tackling the overall problem of global food shortages - but only if we let it.'

That is the crucial issue. Is society ready to change its attitude to GM crops? Major companies - Debenhams is the latest - still announce GM bans, no doubt under pressure from protest groups. But given the science's growing role in helping world food shortages, such decisions should really be seen as acts of shame, not pronouncements of pride. And some scientists believe they can now detect shifts in public attitudes. 'I think we are approaching a tipping point when society will start looking at this as a science that is not going to damage the planet but actually help it,' says McKelvey.

I hope he is right, though I am not so confident. Environmental campaigners, although they do great work, can often display remarkable intransigence. For example, they remain committed to the idea that nuclear energy has no role to play in helping to combat global warming. They react with equal scorn to GM crops. The latter is certainly not a panacea for the ills we will face. On other hand, it certainly has a role to play in helping to save people from starvation, a fact that is worth repeating now and again.

Robin McKie is The Observer's science editor.

Comment by GM-free Ireland

The above article's failure to mention the scientific evidence reveals its bias:

•

The recent International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) found that GM crops have little, if any, role to play in increasing crop yields or alleviating hunger. Released on 15 April 2008, the report represents a three-year effort by about 400 experts around the world working under the auspices of 30 governments and 30 representatives of civil society. The report was sponsored by the United Nations, the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), in collaboration with the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), the U.N. Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). For details see http://www.agassessment.org

•

The recent University of Kansas study by Prof. Barney Gordon, published in the Better Crops journal, found that GM crops do NOT have higher yields, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis. The study - carried out over the past three years in the US grain belt - found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields. See "Exposed: the great GM crops myth Major new study shows that modified soya produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent" published by the UK Independent newspaper on 20 April (see article under this date below).

This study confirms a number of previous findings:

An April 2006 report from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) states that "currently available GM crops do not increase the yield potential of a hybrid variety. [Ö] In fact, yield may even decrease if the varieties used to carry the herbicide tolerant or insect-resistant genes are not the highest yielding cultivars". (Fernandez-Cornejo, J. and Caswell, 2006)

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's 2004 report on agricultural biotechnology acknowledges that GM crops can have reduced yields (FAO, 2004). This is not surprising given that first-generation genetic modifications address production conditions (insect and weed control), and are not intended to increase the intrinsic yield capacity of the plant.

A 2003 report published in Science stated that "in the United States and Argentina, average yield effects [of GM crops] are negligible and in some cases even slightly negative". (Qaim and Zilberman, 2003). This was despite the authors being strong supporters of GM crops.

Comment by "Lion4":

Who said that McKie is a scientist? This is a classic piece of junk science, full of unsupported and unsupportable assumptions and assertions. Are we supposed to take this piece of GM propaganda seriously, when it starts with an invitation for us to take seriously a juxtaposition of two pictures, one saying "GM good" and the other "non-GM Bad." Any fool can put two carefully selected pictures side by side -- I can do the same, by showing a lousy and stunted field trial of GM maize in the FSE programme alongside a fine upstanding crop of non-GM maize on the adjacent control site. I choose not to do that, because you would rightly ask me about the circumstances in which the pictures were taken, and about management regimes, socio- economic factors and so forth.

McKie is trying to do what was done not so long ago in the "Wormy Corn" scandal, where pictures were used selectively (and fraudulently) in a crude attempt to show that people, given a choice, would prefer to eat GM food rather than non-GM food.

And for McKie to trot out quotes from Chris Pollock and Bill McKelvey accusing people of opposing GM "for no good reason" is both patronising and disingenuous. The fact that McKie chooses not to mention any of a whole host of perfectly good reasons (supported by sound evidence) why GM technology is both dangerous and unsuited to the solving of the world's food problems suggests that he has lost touch with reality and has been swept up in the flood of pro-GM propaganda currently emanating from the GM industry. For a start, he might care to look at the Ecologist's recent summary of Ten reasons why GM won't feed the world: www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=1185

That piece is soundly based and well referenced, and McKie might find it instructive.

The global food system feeds gluttonous corporations first

Philadelphia Enquirer (USA), 27 April 2007. By John Nichols (Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine).

The only surprising thing about the global food crisis to Jim Goodman is the notion that anyone finds it surprising.

"So," says the Wisconsin dairy farmer, "they finally figured out, after all these years of pushing globalization and genetically modified seeds, that instead of feeding the world we've created a food system that leaves more people hungry. If they'd listened to farmers instead of corporations, they would've known this was going to happen."

The food shortages, suddenly front-page news, are not new. Hundreds of millions were starving and malnourished last year; the only change is that as the crisis has grown, it has become more difficult to "manage" the hunger that a failed food system accepts rather than feeds.

The current global food system, designed by U.S.-based agribusiness conglomerates like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM and forced into place by the U.S. government and its allies at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, has planted the seeds of disaster by pressuring farmers here and abroad to produce cash crops for export and alternative fuels rather than grow healthy food for local consumption and regional stability.

The only smart short-term response is to throw money at the problem. George W. Bush's release of $200 million in emergency aid to the United Nation's World Food Program last week was appropriate, but Washington must do more. Rising food prices may not be causing riots in the United States, but food banks here are struggling to meet demand as joblessness grows. Congress should answer the call of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) to allocate $100 million more to domestic food programs and make sure, as Rep. Jim McGovern (D.Mass.) urges, that an overdue farm bill expands programs for getting fresh food from local farms to local consumers.

Beyond humanitarian responses, the cure for the global food system - and an unsteady U.S. farm economy - is not more of the same globalization and genetic gimmickry. That way has left 37 nations with food crises while global grain giant Cargill harvests an 86 percent rise in profits and Monsanto reaps record sales from its herbicides and seeds. For years, corporations have promised that problems would be solved by trade deals and technology - especially genetically modified seeds, which University of Kansas research suggests reduce food production and the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development says won't end global hunger. The "market," at least as defined by agribusiness, isn't working.

We "have a herd of market traders, speculators and financial bandits who have turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror," says Jean Ziegler, the U.N. right-to-food advocate. But try telling that to the Bush Administration or to World Bank president (and former White House trade rep) Robert Zoellick, who's busy exploiting tragedy to promote trade liberalization.

"If ever there is a time to cut distorting agricultural subsidies and open markets for food imports, it must be now," says Zoellick.

"Wait a second," replies Dani Rodrik, a Harvard political economist who tracks trade policy. "Wouldn't the removal of these distorting policies raise world prices in agriculture even further?" Yes. World Bank studies confirm that wheat and rice prices will rise if Zoellick gets his way.

Instead of listening to the White House or the World Bank, Congress should recognize - as a handful of visionary members like Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Ohio) have - that current trends confirm the wisdom of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's call for "an urgent rethink of the respective roles of markets and governments." That's far more useful than blaming Midwestern farmers for embracing inflated promises about the potential of ethanol.

We should, however, re-examine whether aggressive U.S. support for biofuels is not only distorting corn prices but also harming livestock and dairy producers who can barely afford feed and fertilizer. Instead of telling farmers they're wrong to seek the best prices for their crops, Congress should make sure farmers can count on good prices for growing the food Americans need. It can do this by providing a strong safety net to survive weather and market disasters and a strategic grain reserve similar to the strategic petroleum reserve to guard against food-price inflation.

Congress should also embrace trade and development policies that help developing countries regulate markets with an eye to feeding the hungry rather than feeding corporate profits. This principle, known as "food sovereignty," sees struggling farmers and hungry people and says, as the Oakland Institute's Anuradha Mittal observes, that it is time to "stop worshiping the golden calf of the so-called free market and embrace, instead, the principle [that] every country and every people have a right to food that is affordable." As Mittal says, "When the market deprives them of this, it is the market that has to give."

John Nichols (jnichols@madison.com) is proprietor of the political blog The Beat and is also editor of the Capitol Times.

The new economics of hunger
Amid brutal convergence of events to hit global market, poor suffer most

Washington Post, 27 April 2008. By Anthony Faiola.

The globe's worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America's great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.

In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect -- one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam's Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.

As prices rose, major grain producers including Argentina and Ukraine, battling inflation caused in part by soaring oil bills, were moving to bar exports on a range of crops to control costs at home. It meant less supply on world markets even as global demand entered a fundamentally new phase. Already, corn prices had been climbing for months on the back of booming government-subsidized ethanol programs. Soybeans were facing pressure from surging demand in China. But as supplies in the pipelines of global trade shrank, prices for corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, rice and other grains began shooting through the roof.

At the same time, food was becoming the new gold. Investors fleeing Wall Street's mortgage-related strife plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into grain futures, driving prices up even more. By Christmas, a global panic was building. With fewer places to turn, and tempted by the weaker dollar, nations staged a run on the American wheat harvest.

Foreign buyers, who typically seek to purchase one or two months' supply of wheat at a time, suddenly began to stockpile. They put in orders on U.S. grain exchanges two to three times larger than normal as food riots began to erupt worldwide. This led major domestic U.S. mills to jump into the fray with their own massive orders, fearing that there would soon be no wheat left at any price.

"Japan, the Philippines, [South] Korea, Taiwan -- they all came in with huge orders, and no matter how high prices go, they keep on buying," said Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade and also an independent trader. Grains have surged so high, he said, that some traders are walking off the floor for weeks at a time, unable to handle the stress.

"We have never seen anything like this before," Voge said. "Prices are going up more in one day than they have during entire years in the past. But no matter the price, there always seems to be a buyer. . . . This isn't just any commodity. It is food, and people need to eat."

Beyond hunger

The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world's poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78 percent. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80 percent, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men -- distributors, processors, even governments -- but consumers worldwide are still feeling the pinch.

The convergence of events has thrown world food supply and demand out of whack and snowballed into civil turmoil. After hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince, Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis was forced to step down this month. At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is struggling for political survival after a March rebuke from voters furious over food prices. In Bangladesh, more than 20,000 factory workers protesting food prices rampaged through the streets two weeks ago, injuring at least 50 people.

To quell unrest, countries including Indonesia are digging deep to boost food subsidies. The U.N. World Food Program has warned of an alarming surge in hunger in areas as far-flung as North Korea and West Africa. The crisis, it fears, will plunge more than 100 million of the world's poorest people deeper into poverty, forced to spend more and more of their income on skyrocketing food bills.

"This crisis could result in a cascade of others . . . and become a multidimensional problem affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.

The new normal

Prices for some crops -- such as wheat -- have already begun to descend off their highs. As farmers rush to plant more wheat now that profit prospects have climbed, analysts predict that prices may come down as much as 30 percent in the coming months. But that would still leave a year-over-year price hike of 45 percent. Few believe prices will go back to where they were in early 2006, suggesting that the world must cope with a new reality of more expensive food.

People worldwide are coping in different ways. For the 1 billion living on less than a dollar a day, it is a matter of survival. In a mud hut on the Sahara's edge, Manthita Sou, a 43-year-old widow in the Mauritanian desert village of Maghleg, is confronting wheat prices that are up 67 percent on local markets in the past year. Her solution: stop eating bread. Instead, she has downgraded to cheaper foods, such as sorghum, a dark grain widely consumed by the world's poorest people. But sorghum has jumped 20 percent in the past 12 months. Living on the 50 cents a day she earns weaving textiles to support a family of three, her answer has been to cut out breakfast, drink tea for lunch and ration a small serving of soupy sorghum meal for family dinners. "I don't know how long we can survive like this," she said.

Countries that have driven food demand in recent years are now grappling with the cost of their own success -- rising prices. Although China has tried to calm its people by announcing reserve grain holdings of 30 to 40 percent of annual production, a number that had been a state secret, anxiety is still running high. In the southern province of Guangdong, there are reports of grain hoarding; and in Hong Kong, consumers have stripped store shelves of bags of rice.

Liu Yinhua, a retired factory worker who lives in the port city of Ningbo on China's east coast, said her family of three still eats the same things, including pork ribs, fish and vegetables. But they are eating less of it.

"Almost everything is more expensive now, even normal green vegetables," said Liu, 53. "The level of our quality of life is definitely reduced."

In India, the government recently scrapped all import duties on cooking oils and banned exports of non-basmati rice. As in many parts of the developing world, the impact in India is being felt the most among the urban poor who have fled rural life to live in teeming slums. At a dusty and nearly empty market in one New Delhi neighborhood this week, shopkeeper Manjeet Singh, 52, said people at the market have started hoarding because of fear that rice and oil will run out.

"If one doesn't have enough to fill one's own stomach, then what's the use of an economic boom in exports?" he said, looking sluggish in the scorching afternoon sun. He said his customers were asking for cheaper goods, like groundnut oil instead of soybean oil.

Even wealthy nations are being forced to adjust to a new normal. In Japan, a country with a distinct cultural aversion to cheaper, genetically modified grains, manufacturers are risking public backlash by importing them for use in processed foods for the first time. Inflation in the 15-country zone that uses the euro -- which includes France, Germany, Spain and Italy -- hit 3.6 percent in March, the highest rate since the currency was adopted almost a decade ago and well above the European Central Bank's target of 2.0 percent. Food and oil prices were mostly to blame.

In the United States, experts say consumers are scaling down on quality and scaling up on quantity if it means a better unit price. In the meat aisles of major grocery stores, said Phil Lempert, a supermarket analyst, steaks are giving way to chopped beef and people used to buying fresh blueberries are moving to frozen. Some are even trying to grow their own vegetables.

"A bigger pinch than ever before," said Pat Carroll, a retiree in Congress Heights. "I don't ever remember paying $3 for a loaf of bread."

Ill-equipped markets

The root cause of price surges varies from crop to crop. But the crisis is being driven in part by an unprecedented linkage of the food chain.

A big reason for higher wheat prices, for instance, is the multiyear drought in Australia, something that scientists say may become persistent because of global warming. But wheat prices are also rising because U.S. farmers have been planting less of it, or moving wheat to less fertile ground. That is partly because they are planting more corn to capitalize on the biofuel frenzy.

This year, at least a fifth and perhaps a quarter of the U.S. corn crop will be fed to ethanol plants. As food and fuel fuse, it has presented a boon to American farmers after years of stable prices. But it has also helped spark the broader food-price shock.

"If you didn't have ethanol, you would not have the prices we have today," said Bruce Babcock, a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University. "It doesn't mean it's the sole driver. Prices would be higher than we saw earlier in this decade because world grain supplies are tighter now than earlier in the decade. But we've introduced a new demand into the market."

In fact, many economists now say food prices should have climbed much higher much earlier.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world seemed to shrink with rapidly opening markets, surging trade and improved communication and transportation technology. Given new market efficiencies and the wide availability of relatively cheap food, the once-common practice of hoarding grains to protect against the kind of shortfall the world is seeing now seemed more and more archaic. Global grain reserves plunged.

Yet there was one big problem. The global food trade never became the kind of well-honed machine that has made the price of manufactured goods such as personal computers and flat-screen TVs increasingly similar worldwide. With food, significant subsidies and other barriers meant to protect farmers -- particularly in Europe, the United States and Japan -- have distorted the real price of food globally, economists say, preventing the market from normal price adjustments as global demand has climbed.

If market forces had played a larger role in food trade, some now argue, the world would have had more time to adjust to more gradually rising prices.

"The international food trade didn't undergo the same kind of liberalization as other trade," said Richard Feltes, senior vice president of MF Global, a futures brokerage. "We can see now that the world has largely failed in its attempt to create an integrated food market."

In recent years, there has been a great push to liberalize food markets worldwide -- part of what is known as the "Doha round" of world trade talks -- but resistance has come from both the developed and developing worlds. Perhaps more than any other sector, nations have a visceral desire to protect their farmers, and thusly, their food supply. The current food crisis is causing advocates on both sides to dig in. Consider, for instance, the French.

The European Union doles out about $41 billion a year in agriculture subsidies, with France getting the biggest share, about $8.2 billion. The 27-nation bloc also has set a target for biofuels to supply 10 percent of transportation fuel needs by 2020 to combat global warming.

The French, whose farmers over the years have become addicted to generous government handouts, argue that agriculture subsidies must be continued and even increased in order to encourage more food production, especially with looming shortages.

Last week, French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier warned E.U. officials against "too much trust in the free market." "We must not leave the vital issue of feeding people," he said, "to the mercy of market laws and international speculation."

Staff writers Dan Morgan, Steven Mufson and Jane Black in Washington and correspondents Ariana Eunjung Cha in Beijing, Emily Wax in New Delhi and John Ward Anderson in Paris contributed to this report.

France: 'Sarkozette' skewers the men in France's cabinet
Minister labels male colleagues coward

The Sunday Times (UK), 27 April 2008. By Matthew Campbell in Paris.

A young French minister who provoked a political storm by branding her male colleagues as cowardly has defended herself by describing the women in President Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet as more "original" than the men.

Sometimes described as one of the brainiest women in government, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 34, the junior environment minister, catapulted herself into the limelight earlier this month by accusing senior party members of "cowardice" in their policy towards genetically modified crops, which she firmly opposes.

It was the latest in a series of embarrassments for the government and in the ensuing uproar she was struck from a list of guests accompanying the prime minister on a visit to Japan.

The public has rallied around the "green Sarkozette" ‚ according to one poll, 80% agreed with her stand ‚ and she has not been tempted to alter her opinion of male politicians. Far from it.

"They make you feel that they've been there since the dawn of time and that the women's presence is less legitimate," she said in an interview over lunch in her ministry last week.

Warming to her theme, she went on: "There is more variety of character in the women than in the men. The men are more traditional but the women bring more originality, even if they are not necessarily the easiest of characters."

Originality certainly seems to be an attribute of Kosciusko-Morizet, a science graduate from an illustrious political family of Polish origin which has produced ambassadors, senators, mayors and a member of the wartime resistance.

She chose to do her military service in a naval outpost off the coast of Djibouti and her harp-playing and horsemanship have also helped her to stand out from the crowd.

The "cowardice" incident was not the first time that she had attracted the wrath of her colleagues: she was attacked for planting a kiss on the cheek of JosÈ BovÈ, the antiglobalisation campaigner who has spent the past few years in and out of jail for destroying genetically modified crops.

Kosciusko-Morizet claimed that a male politician who kissed a female activist would not have caused such a fuss and besides, she said, "I have never asked permission, even from my father, to kiss anyone."

Battling to shore up his crumbling approval rating one year after coming to power, Sarkozy went on television last week complaining about "young ministers" such as Kosciusko-Morizet speaking out of turn and warning that he would not forgive the next indiscretion.

However much he approves in private of the verve of his "environmental muse", as Kosciusko-Morizet has been called, he has been accused of "reverse machismo" in his indulgence of women ministers and there has been grumbling in the ranks of the party.

Rama Yade, the 31-year-old undersecretary for human rights, has twice put her foot in it with impunity, most recently when she contradicted government policy by attaching conditions to Sarkozy's participation in the Olympic Games opening ceremony this summer in Beijing.

Kosciusko-Morizet dismissed allegations of favouritism, however. "The men try to make us think there are favourites," she said, "but if there was so much favouritism there would be more than 18% women in the national assembly. Our political life needs more biodiversity."

She insisted nevertheless that "Sarko", who married Carla Bruni, the top model and folk singer, in February and who has packed his cabinet with women to fulfil a campaign promise to promote sexual equality in government, was more advanced than most other male politicians when it came to dealings with women.

"Many male politicians often have difficulty working with women, and difficulty accepting women as legitimate partners in political life," she said.

"But he [Sarkozy] thinks that women's presence is perfectly normal. He doesn't have any problems working with women. In France that does not make him part of the majority."

Kosciusko-Morizet, who is married with a two-year-old son, is just as passionate about environmental issues as she is about putting women into power. She switched the Peugot 607 that came with her job for a less polluting, and much smaller, Peugeot 308.

"When I go to official functions," she said with a laugh, "the security agents often don't recognise it as a minister's car."

A former environmental adviser in the government of Jacques Chirac, she became an MP in 2002 and has made it her priority to promote more awareness of how environmental issues affect health.

"I think we're behind other countries in this regard," Kosciusko-Morizet said. "It was when I was pregnant with my son that I realised how little information there was.

"When you say to a doctor, I've got a young child, I live in an urban zone and want to take him out every day but I'm afraid of pollution, is it better in the morning or evening, the doctor hasn't a clue." She went on: "At the gynaecologist you've got all these leaflets telling you to be careful about various foods and so on but nothing about the environment and health."

She tries to practise what she preaches: "I like to have bio food. I take care of the quality of air. And the baby's intercom should not be too close to his head."

Another issue to absorb her attention is the melting of the world's glaciers. "Experts say now that it is going two to three times faster than we thought and that some of the big ones will have disappeared by 2020 or 2030," she said.

Apart from encouraging flooding and drought in countries such as India, this could also kill off the European winter sports industry.

"To buy a chalet at this moment on a 25-year mortgage thinking that you'll be able to go every year to practise winter sports is pure folly," she said.

As for Sarkozy's dwindling popularity, she said the French were impatient for change.

"People voted for change by electing Sarkozy," she said. "Now they're saying: when is it changing, when are we going to see the results?"

USA: Lack of oversight has growers, environmentalists concerned
The debate over GMOs in Napa Valley

Napa Valley Register, 27 April 2008. By Juliane Poirier Locke.

One of the dominant debates in the world of agriculture is the role of genetically-modified organisms. So-called GMOs can increase crop productivity and resistance to disease, but also increase risks to native and wild species and even to larger ecosystems.

From Mendocino County to the European Union, regulations have been drawn up to limit or ban GMOs, even as they play a larger and larger role in the world's food supply. In Napa County, a vigorous debate is taking place in agricultural circles as the wine industry considers the risks and potential of GMOs.

Genetically modified yeasts, which encourage stable fermentation and affect the flavor of wines, are already on the market. Genetically engineered grapevines, designed to resist Pierce's disease and vineyard pests, are presently being developed and are expected to arrive on the market in five or 10 years.

Yet the Napa Valley wine industry has been cool to the concept of GMOs. Viticulturalists are leery of the environmental effects and lack of regulation of GMOs. Winemakers share those concerns and believe that even if GMOs eventually produce some benefits, their presence would likely prove a marketing negative, hurting sales overseas and discouraging interest in an industry that celebrates its time-honored traditions.

None of those interviewed for these articles knew of anyone in the Napa Valley openly using GMO products.

ForÝ nearly a year, Napa County environmentalists, grapegrowers and others have been meeting regularly to examine the possible impact of GMOs. The Napa GMO Stakeholder Group was spearheaded by Erica Martenson, a strong GMO critic who founded the group Preserving the Integrity of Napa's Agriculture or PINA.

Martenson has considered leading the charge to place a GMO moratorium on the Napa County ballot, a move that has been made elsewhere. For example, voters in Mendocino and Santa Cruz counties have approved GMO bans. Sonoma County voters rejected one in 2005.

Environmental activists are pressing for bans in Lake County and Monterey County.

Martenson said she would like to see a precautionary ban on all GMOs in Napa County and a ban on all field-testing of GMOs until scientists have rigorously assessed environmental hazards. But for now, the action in Napa Valley is around the conference table, where Martenson and other member of the stakeholders group explore the issues.

"Maybe in the future GMOs will have effective regulatory oversight," says Martenson. "But until that exists, genetic experimentation should be restricted to the laboratory or greenhouse."

Not going with the flow

PINA opposes the genetically engineered wine yeasts and field experiments for all genetically engineered plants because of inevitable gene flow, the process by which these plants crossbreed with non-GMO plants. The resulting offspring bear the engineered gene.

New gene combinations, whether designed or not, can behave in unpredictable ways. For example, the changes in chemistry can harm wildlife that feed upon the gene-contaminated plant. One well-documented case from the 1990s involved Monsanto's Bt corn, dubbed "killer corn," which created its own pesticide. Other "killer" crops followed. Later, Bt corn was shown to harm monarch butterflies that fed on the engineered pollen. Bt corn pollen also contaminated natural corn varieties in Mexico.

Chris Howell, of Cain Vineyard and Winery, represents the Napa Valley Vintners in the GMO Stakeholders study group.

He expresses concerns about testing and regulation of GMOs. The federal government has not moved aggressively into the arena, and some say local GMO bans may prove ineffective. Because plants, birds and prevailing winds do not follow county boundaries, the patchwork of local regulation may do little to stop the spread of GMOs.

"Genetics is complex," says Howell. "And there is a black hole of things we don't know about, so you go right to the precautionary principle. The technology itself is neither good nor bad. It merely creates new possibilities. But where is the financial incentive to understand all the ramifications?"

Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., said there is no financial incentive for agribusiness to understand all the ramifications.

"The present regulatory system puts the burden of proof for safety upon the bioengineering corporation," says Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist who formerly worked or the Environmental Protection Agency. "Based on the scientific literature, we conclude that the existing guidelines are a very weak regulatory process."

Grassroots action

Napa County Agricultural Commissioner Dave Whitmer is encouraging the stakeholder group. While he is wary of the effectiveness of local bans, he said he is sympathetic with those critical of the current lack of regulation.

"I know why people are not satisfied with the way the government is handling the issues," said Whitmer. "It's no wonder that groups have been taking initiatives to their county supervisors, trying to get ordinances passed.

"The trend is toward patchwork regulations," he said, "which may get the feds to delegate authority to the states."

Current state and federal laws apply to the oversight of pesticide use and organic farming in California, but do not regulate GMOs.

In recent years, California lawmakers have considered GMO regulation. But the debate has nothing to do with the scientific questions fueling the discussion in Napa County. Instead, it addresses a dispute between farmers and agribusinesses like Monsanto that develop and market GMOs and farmers.

The latest effort, AB 541, sponsored by state Assemblyman Jared Huffman, whose district includes Marin County and part of Sonoma County, is intended to protect non-GMO farmers from patent infringements lawsuits accusing farmers of stealing genetically engineered property when pollen or seeds from GMO crops drift and contaminate non-GMO crops.

AB 541 passed in the Assembly in January, and could become California's first GMO legislation.

USA: Livestock producers want legislators to repeal ethanol law

Associated Press, 27 April 2008. By Chris Blank.

JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri ó A newly implemented ethanol mandate coupled with rising livestock feed prices is dividing Missouri's farmers.

It pits corn farmers, who are getting record prices for their grain, against livestock producers, who are struggling to feed their herds.

At the center has been a law that, starting this year, requires most Missouri gasoline to be blended with 10 percent ethanol if the biofuel is cheaper than regular gas.

Corn farmers defend the four-month old mandate as "one of the greatest Missouri economic development bills." But livestock producers ó many of whom voted for it two years ago ó argue it's contributing to a "livestock industry meltdown" by leading to higher feed prices. And they're lining up to get it repealed.

Rep. Mike Dethrow, a hog marketer from rural southern Missouri who has filed legislation to lift the ethanol mandate, said knowing what he does today about where corn prices have gone, he would not have supported the bill requiring ethanol two years ago.

"It is a piece of the puzzle," said Dethrow, R-Alton. "The solution is probably the free market. The solution is probably not more government."

But corn farmers say misperception, foreign demand and a less valuable American currency spurring more grain exports are each much bigger factors than ethanol in the livestock feed prices puzzle.

"There are a lot of factors out there that are affecting this thing," said Gary Clark, the senior director of market development for the Missouri Corn Growers Association. "There is just not that magic bullet that is all of a sudden going to take livestock prices up and grain and corn prices down."

Clark said livestock producers see their feed costs rising, read about the state's ethanol mandate and assume that one led to another because that's the most obvious difference. But he argues it's the less visible market factors that are actually driving prices. Plus, ethanol plants offset some of the corn they use by producing distiller's grains that can be used to feed livestock.

The ethanol split has been a particularly public divide in a farming community that frequently aligns together in the Capitol to form a potent force, often able to offset the power of the more numerous suburban and urban lawmakers.

Even so, Missouri's agricultural interests sometimes have been a divided monolith. In recent years, there have been breaks over whether cities and counties should be allowed to regulate concentrated animal feeding operations and genetically modified crops.

But schisms have generally separated large and small farming operations and not crops versus animals. The break over ethanol comes as some lawmakers want the state to create a similar mandate to require a biodiesel fuel blend.

Rep. Steve Hobbs, an ethanol backer and corn grower from mid-Missouri, likened Missouri's farmers to neighbors: They want to help each other, but there is also a sense that people have to look out for themselves.

"There's always been a delicate balance between grain farmers and livestock producers," said Hobbs, R-Mexico.

Some livestock producers are convinced the state has sided with grain farmers by passing a law that creates a guaranteed market for corn whenever ethanol is cheaper than gas. That's upset the equilibrium in a relationship where the participants want corn prices moving in opposite directions.

"That's the rub, that we came in and helped one segment of ag, but we didn't help the rest," said Rep. Tom Loehner, who has cattle and sheep but also grows some corn and beans on his farm in Osage County south of the Missouri River.

Even if divided, grain growers and meat producers have so far remained civil.

Missouri's corn commodity group is working with beef producers to find ways to use ethanol byproducts to feed animals and to better explain why they think livestock feed prices are increasing. During a hearing on the bill to repeal the ethanol mandate, livestock producers frequently caged their criticisms of it with the disclaimer that "I like corn farmers."

"These guys, the corn growers, had some tough times," said Loehner, R-Koeltztown. "They're saying, ëOK we're making a few dollars, and we don't want to give that up.' And we don't begrudge you, we just need to get our own prices."

Warrior mosquito plan under fire in Malaysia: report

AFP, 27 April 2008. KUALA LUMPUR - Environmentalists have condemned a trial plan to deploy millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in Malaysia to fight dengue fever, a report said Sunday.

Malaysia has expressed concern about the insect-borne scourge after 25 people were killed in the first three months of the year.

The New Sunday Times newspaper said the genetically modified (GM) male mosquitoes will be first freed in Ketam island, a fishing village south of Kuala Lumpur, in an attempt to kill Aedes mosquitoes which spread dengue fever.

Environmental groups, however, oppose the plan.

"Like all GM organisations, once they have been released in the wild, how do you prevent them from interacting with other insects and produce mutants which may be worse than the Aedes mosquito," said Gurmit Singh, chairman of the Center for Environment Technology and Development.

Dengue is endemic to Malaysia, which has seen a rise of 16 percent in cases every year since 2003, according to the government.

Fatalities from dengue in Malaysia reached record levels in 2004, when 102 people died.

Health Minister Liow Tiong Lai said in the first three months of 2008, more than 9,800 cases of the mosquito-borne disease were reported, with 25 people killed.

The field trials for the GM mosquitoes will be undertaken by the Malaysian health ministry and British-based Oxiter Ltd, an insect bio-tech company.

The newspaper said lab trials conducted for the first time in the world during the past one year had produced success, and that field testing would begin by early next year.

The technique involves releasing GM-made Aedes mosquitoes to mate with the female mosquitoes of the same type, it said. The lethal genes from the warrior mosquitoes cause the larvae to die.

Only a female mosquito can transmit dengue fever because it has a proboscis that can pierce the skin.

26 April 2008

Africa: Genes as the solution

Financial Express , April 26 2008.

In 2002, the Zambian government did something stupendously silly. It banned maize imports needed to feed its famine stricken population. Millions died as a result. The government shrugged and said the maize was "genetically modified" (GM) and therefore dangerous.

When famine returned in 2005, the government was forced to lift the ban. By now, however, Europe had hardened its position on GM food. Europe, being sparsely populated, can insist on every GM based food product being labelled accordingly, and can afford to wait and watch. The priorities of the Zambian population, though, are quite clear. If it nourishes, it is food. In fact, as a global food crisis unfolds, it is a good time to wonder how many years we have needlessly lost on a potential solution. As circumstances have it, most research in the area has been led by the private sector. The 1960s Green Revolution was led by government agencies, which often transferred the seeds and technology to the third world, apparently free, getting only goodwill in return. But recipient countries such as India that has set up chains of agricultural institutes, managed to lull themselves into a belief that they had licked the food scarcity.

By the time GM crops entered the market in the mid-1990s, it was clear that the food scarcity problem was not quite over, even if Malthusian starvation nightmares had been dismissed. Yet, it took people long to be thankful to private food Companies that had stepped into the void created by decades of neglect of agricultural research by government agencies. Expecting biotech Companies to give out the results of their research for free is unrealistic, unless the world community pitches inòa la India's telecom fund for rural connectivity. But the world should be glad that advanced scientific work on pest-resistant and high-yield crops has actually been done. In 2006-07, more than 32,000 sq km of GM cotton was harvested amid protests. That's plenty, but compared with the potential, the area is a mere speck. In food, the gains could be enormous just in terms of the crops' ability to survive pest attacks, water shortages and harsh conditions. This is not "Frankenfood", a grossly misleading image crafted by GM food opponents. It is modern technology. As with nuclear power, that it evokes fear and mistrust is not a reasonable guide to public policy.

Comment from GM Watch:

Even by the standards of the current deluge of uncritical nonsense about GM being the answer to the food crisis, this piece from India's Finacial Express stands out.

Apart from anything else it employs the Zambian-GM-genocide urban myth, according to which rejection of GM food aid by the Zambian government in 2002 resulted in starvation.

Nobody died in Zambia when it rejected GM food. Non-GM food, which was readily available in the region, was provided instead. The Zambian Red Cross is unequivocal about this, "We didn't record a single death arising out of hunger." http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5384

But that hasn't stopped this sustained campaign of black propaganda. Note also that the claim here that the Zambian government subsequently back tracked on its opposition to GM is equally false.

For more on this black propaganda campaign see 'Fake Blood on the Maize': http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5384

USA: Agricultural Giant Battles Small Farmers
Monsanto Goes To Great Lengths To Protect Its Patents On Genetically Modified Crops

[Note: You can also watch the video of the following CBS News report at http://www.mail-gateway.co.uk:32000/mail/]

CBS News, April 26 2008.

ST. LOUIS -- American farmers have been growing genetically modified crops for years, from seeds engineered to resist pests and chemicals. These patented seeds produced bigger crops and profits for farmers who bought them from companies like DuPont and Monsanto, but for other farmers the seeds have created a host of problems. CBS News Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian has been investigating.

____

David Runyon and his wife Dawn put a lifetime of work into their 900-acre Indiana farm, and almost lost it all over a seed they say they never planted.

"I don't believe any company has the right to come into someone's home and threaten their livelihood," Dawn said, "to bring them into such physical turmoil as this company did to us."

The Runyons charge bio-tech giant Monsanto sent investigators to their home unannounced, demanded years of farming records, and later threatened to sue them for patent infringement. The Runyons say an anonymous tip led Monsanto to suspect that genetically modified soybeans were growing on their property.

"I wasn't using their products, but yet they were pounding on my door demanding information, demanding records," Dave said. "It was just plain harassment is what they were doing."

Today, Monsanto's patented "Round-up Ready" soy commands the lion's share of the genetically-modified soybean seed market, its genetic code manipulated to withstand the company's popular weed killer.

But the promise of fewer weeds and greater production comes with a hefty fee. Farmers must sign an iron-clad agreement not to re-plant the harvested seed, or face serious legal consequences - up to $3 million in damages.

"It's about protecting the patent, defending the patents, so farmers have the protection and can use these technologies over time," said Monsanto spokeswoman Tami Craig Schilling.

The Runyons say they signed no agreements, and if they were contaminated with the genetically modified seed, it blew over from a neighboring farm.

"Pollination occurs, wind drift occurs. There's just no way to keep their products from landing in our fields," David said.

"What Monsanto is doing across the country is often, and according to farmers, trespassing even, on their land, examining their crops and trying to find some of their patented crops," said Andrew Kimbrell, with the Center For Food Safety. "And if they do, they sue those farmers for their entire crop."

In fact, in Feb. 2005 the Runyons received a letter from Monsanto, citing "an agreement" with the Indiana Department of Agriculture giving it the right to come on their land and test for seed contamination.

Only one problem: The Indiana Department of Agriculture didn't exist until two months after that letter was sent. What does that say to you?

"I'm not aware of the specific situation in Indiana," Schilling said.

"I'm just talking in general terms," said Keteyian. "Would Monsanto lie, deceive, intimidate, harass American farmers to protect its patents?"

"With farmers as customers I would say that is not our policy by any means."

74-year-old Mo Parr is a seed cleaner; he is hired by farmers to separate debris from the seed to be replanted. Monsanto sued him claiming he was "aiding and abetting" farmers, helping them to violate the patent.

"There's no way that I could be held responsible," Parr said. "There's no way that I could look at a soy bean and tell you if it's Round-up Ready."

The company subpoenaed Parr's bank records, without his knowledge, and found his customers. After receiving calls from Monsanto, some of them stopped talking to him.

"It really broke my heart," Parr said. "You know, I could hardly hold a cup of coffee that morning,"

Monsanto won its case against Parr, but the company, which won't comment on specific cases, has stopped its legal action against the Runyons.

And now four states, including Indiana, prohibit seed suppliers from entering a farmer's property without a state agent, tactics which have threatened a way of life.

USA: Bill to Ban 'Human-Animal' Hybrid Introduced in Congress
The Act places a ban on the creation, transfer, or transportation of a human-animal hybrid.
It was introduced by Catholic Congressman Chris Smith.

Catholic Online U.S. News, 26 April 2008. By John-Henry Westen.

WASHINGTON, DC - Yesterday, Rep. Chris Smith introduced the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act, H.R. 5910, to ban the creation of part-human, part-animal hybrid beings.

The legislation is timely as researchers are already tinkering with human-animal hybrid technologies.

British scientists are actively perfecting the hybrid technique. On April 1, 2008 the BBC reported that, "Scientists at Newcastle University have created part-human, part-animal hybrid embryos for the first time in the UK."

The Act places a ban on the creation, transfer, or transportation of a human-animal hybrid. Human-animal hybrids are defined as:

1) A human embryo into which animal cells are introduced, making its humanity uncertain.

2a) An embryo created by fertilizing a human egg with non-human sperm.

2b) An embryo created by fertilizing a non-human egg with human sperm.

3a) An embryo created by introducing a non-human nucleus into a human egg.

3b) An embryo created by introducing a human nucleus into a non-human egg.

4) An embryo containing mixed sets of chromosomes from both a human and animal.

5) An animal with human reproductive organs.

6) An animal with a whole or predominantly human brain.

The matter is not only of interest to pro-life advocates. Environmental activists and those concerned for public health also have reasons to seek a ban on such experimentation.

From a public health standpoint, a backgrounder on the legislation points out that "The world has recently experienced an increase in infections emerging from animal populations that threaten human health. Human-animal hybrids present an optimal opportunity for genetic transfer that could increase the risk for transmission of both human and animal diseases, such as Bird Flu and SARS."

Environmental advocates have also pointed out that genetically modified hybrids could have a devastating effect on the natural environments of native animal populations.

The introduction of human genetics could lead to hybrids with superior abilities who could "out-compete" the native populations, causing unforeseen problems to the ecosystem.

Canada: The seeds of catastrophe

Globe and Mail, 26 April 2008. By Ingeborg Boyens.

STUFFED AND STARVED
Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System
By Raj Patel
HarperCollins, 438 pages, $29.95

GOOD CROP/BAD CROP
Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada
By Devlin Kuyek
Between the Lines
147 pages, $22.95

"Food Riots in Haiti." "Continuing Demonstrations in Egypt." "Protests Against High Food Costs in Bangladesh." It is strange here in the land of plenty to see headlines trumpeting massive food shortages around the globe. However, these headlines are an ominous sign that the economic arrangements that produce and distribute our food are breaking down.

The impending food crisis in much of the developing world would not surprise Raj Patel. In Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System, he effectively argues there is something wrong with an economic model that leaves 800 million people on Earth hungry while another billion are overfed. "Unless you are a corporate food executive," Patel writes, "the system isn't working for you."

In past years, the food system has been the focus of several writers, such as Eric Schlosser with Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan with The Omnivore's Dilemma. Patel significantly adds to the topic with a thorough and impassioned work that looks at how corporate control and global trade markets have wounded farmers and consumers around the world. He successfully connects the dots of seemingly disparate issues like hunger, obesity, free trade, rural depopulation and food safety to create the picture of a food system run by corporate greed.

Patel is well-equipped for his take on the globalization of food. He worked for the World Bank, interned at the World Trade Organization, and consulted for the United Nations before he became an activist opposed to many of policies of his former employers. Patel - who lives in South Africa and California - has directed his attention to the haves and have-nots of the world - those who are "stuffed" by often obscene amounts of food while others are "starved" because the global food system ignores them. Although it may seem a contradiction, Patel writes that both are victims of a grotesquely unbalanced food system.

Patel argues that the irony of a world in which there are now more fat people than hungry ones is the inevitable outcome of a system in which a handful of corporations have been allowed to capture the wealth in the food supply chain. The modern food structure, Patel explains, evolved from an imperial past in which European nations destroyed the economies of countries to get their hands on sugar, tea and spices. Today, a surprisingly small number of corporations own the seed companies, agrochemical manufacturers, processors and supermarkets that control what we see on our plates, often by running roughshod over small rural landowners in the developing world.

Farmers, whether in Canada or in developing countries, may grow our crops, vegetables and livestock, but they paradoxically have little control over what we eat. In fact, they often become members of the "starved" category under pressure from a global, supply-and-demand trading system that sets prices and pushes them to produce for consumers in distant industrialized countries. Although rural communities around the world have been neglected by the global system, Patel begins his look at rural injustice in India, where a shocking number of farmers have responded to despair by drinking agricultural pesticides.

Patel writes that even in the industrialized North, where "stuffed" consumers may be dazzled with signs of plenitude at the local supermarket, they actually have little "choice." Yes, they have the choice between Pepsi and Coke, but any other options seem to be prescribed by those who control the system. The result is that many people are obese from unhealthy calories, susceptible to heart disease, diabetes and other diet-related issues.

This is often depressing material. But ultimately, Patel is hopeful, championing the work of movements that challenge the system. He writes about the global network of peasant farmer organizations, Via Campesina, that has pulled together 150 million people from around the world; the Landless Rural Workers Movement in Brazil, which has resettled one million people since the 1970s in communities that practise sustainable farming; efforts to challenge the food retail establishment with initiatives like the People's Grocery, in California, which grows its own food on donated land.

Patel's book is an impassioned plea for change. To urge us all to fight back to develop a new food system, Patel has set up a website and come up with a 10-point action plan which he says everyone should try.

Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada, by Devlin Kuyek, a Montreal-based researcher with the international NGO GRAIN, is a smaller offering with a narrower focus, but it too is critical of the global food system. Its heart is the very foundation of food, the seed.

Although Kuyek has also travelled the world, he chooses here to explore how Canada's regulatory system has systematically removed control of seeds from farmers and given it, through public breeding rights (PBR) and patents on single genes, to the corporate sector. In the past, farmers themselves saved seed from one harvest to plant the next year. They were essentially breeding crops specifically for their land. Anything new was produced by a public university. Now, for many crops, farmers have to buy hybrid seeds or sign contracts when they purchase genetically modified seeds saying that they won't re-use them. The consequence is a small number of seeds stipulated by the corporations that control the food system, rather than a broad biodiversity controlled by farmers.

This book may seem a bit technical for the average reader, but Kuyek tells an important story about the very foundation of food. Where Patel has chosen to go wide, Kuyek's assessment of the food system is narrow, but just as critical.

Judging by books, films, and movements like the Slow Food campaign or the 100-Mile Diet, food is becoming the issue of our times. These two books add to the debate about our global food system and forcefully argue that we have to change. Otherwise, protests about overwhelming food costs and widespread shortages will grow and we will be faced with a crisis that may even spill over into our comfortable, overfed First World lives.

Ingeborg Boyens has written extensively about food and farming. Her most recent book is Another Season's Promise: Hope and Despair in Canada's Farm Country.

Ireland: GM foods offer solution to crisis

Irish Independent, letter to the editor, 26 April 2008.

Kevin Myers' column on genetically modified (GM) foods (Irish Independent, April 23) presented the GM crop dilemma as being that food shortages are causing riots and global warming looms.

No one should state GM food is a standalone answer to world hunger, but the "eco-mob" should not dogmatically rule GM out as part of the solution.

The eco-mob has always used whatever fear is the flavour of the month against GM. For example, in more abundant times past, Al Gore had concerns of GM crops producing too much food: "The most lasting impact of biotechnology on the food supply may come not from something going wrong, but from all going right.

My biggest fear is not that by accident we will set loose some genetically defective Andromeda strain. Given our past record in dealing with agriculture, we're far more likely to accidentally drown ourselves in a sea of excess grain".

Let's hope this Al Gore prediction will become a reality as opposed to his other famous forecasts.

Comment from GM-free Ireland

Shane Morris is the Canadian Government operative whose attempts to sabotage Ireland's policy to keep the island of Ireland off-limits to GM crops has been denounced by 33 Senators and MPs in the Irish Senate and the UK House of Commons.

For details see our press release at www.gmfreeireland.org/press/GMFI38.pd and background info at www.gmfreeireland.org/morris/

Statistics Canada says the country's farmers are producing more canola than at any other time in history. Steve Ladurantaye takes a look at a particularly Canadian crop

Globe and Mail (Canada), 26 April 2008. By Steve Ladurantaye.

1 EARLY DAYS

Canola was developed in the 1970s by Canadian farmers and researchers looking for a tastier and healthier variety of rapeseed. The plant, used as a food source in Asia for thousands of years, was introduced to Canada during the Second World War, when it was grown mostly for conversion into industrial lubricant. After the war, Canadian farmers realized there could be a market for rapeseed if the fat content could be reduced and the taste improved.

2 HEALTHIER CHOICE

University of Manitoba plant breeder Baldur Stefansson and Agriculture Canada's R.K. Downey are credited with creating the first strains of canola. Using varieties of rapeseeds that didn't contain as much erucic - a fatty acid - they bred a new variety of seed. In 1974, it was released commercially. Two years later, 98.5 per cent of Canadian rapeseed farmers were working with the new crop, renamed canola (it means Canadian oil) in 1978. So how much healthier is it? Saturated fat - linked to heart disease and other ailments - makes up 68 per cent of butter. Canola oil? Seven per cent.

3 BIG BUSINESS

Canadian farmers are expected to plant a record 14.8 million acres of canola this year, Statistics Canada estimates. That's slightly above last year's level, also a record. In 2007 a farmer could expect to collect $6 per bushel, but this year they expect to pull in $14 per bushel. Canada produces some 6.2 million tonnes of canola seed per year, 20 per cent of the world's supply - of this, 3.4 million tonnes is exported as seed, 706,000 tonnes as oil and another 1.15 million tonnes as meal. The United States is the largest importer.

4 WAYWARD STRAINS

Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser and his wife, Louise, became global symbols for farmers' rights after a decade-long legal battle with agribusiness giant Monsanto over wayward canola. Monsanto sued in 1997 after plants grown from seeds genetically modified to resist a Monsanto herbicide turned up in the Schmeisers' field. The company alleged the farmer knowingly planted them without paying the technology fees. The Schmeisers argued they blew onto their property. Seven years later, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of Monsanto but decided the Schmeisers did not have to pay damages. The next year, the Schmeisers found more genetically modified canola on their farm, pulled it up, sent Monsanto a bill for $660 and launched a small claims case. The firm paid the money in March to settle the case.

5 BIODIESEL

Many farmers, as well as the Canola Council of Canada, would like to see the seed become the basis of this country's biofuel initiatives. Canadian Bioenergy Corp. is a believer, building a $90-million refinery in Alberta, scheduled to open in 2009.

It is expected to process 500,000 tonnes of seed into 225,000 tonnes of biofuel annually. There's global competition - by 2010, Europe will be importing 400,000 tonnes of Canadian canola oil for use in biodiesel.

UK: 'Sustainable' Bio-Plastic Can Damage The Environment

The Guardian, 26 April 2008. By John Vidal, environment editor.

Supermarkets' efforts to find new compostable plastics bring environmental problems. Photograph: Linda Nylind The worldwide effort by supermarkets and industry to replace conventional oil-based plastic with eco-friendly "bioplastics" made from plants is causing environmental problems and consumer confusion, according to a Guardian study.

The substitutes can increase emissions of greenhouse gases on landfill sites, some need high temperatures to decompose and others cannot be recycled in Britain.

Many of the bioplastics are also contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for human consumption.

The market for bioplastics, which are made from maize, sugarcane, wheat and other crops, is growing by 20-30% a year.

The industry, which uses words such as "sustainable", "biodegradeable", "compostable" and "recyclable" to describe its products, says bioplastics make carbon savings of 30-80% compared with conventional oil-based plastics and can extend the shelf-life of food.

Concern centres on corn-based packaging made with polylactic acid (Pla). Made from GM crops, it looks identical to conventional polyethylene terephthalate (Pet) plastic and is produced by US company NatureWorks. The company is jointly owned by Cargill, the world's second largest biofuel producer, and Teijin, one of the world's largest plastic manufacturers.

Pla is used by some of the biggest supermarkets and food companies, including Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Del Monte. It is used by Marks & Spencer to package organic foods, salads, snacks, desserts, and fruit and vegetables.

It is also used to bottle Belu mineral water, which is endorsed by environmentalists because the brand's owners invest all profits in water projects in poor countries. Wal-Mart has said it plans to use 114m Pla containers over the course of a year.

While Pla is said to offer more disposal options, the Guardian has found that it will barely break down on landfill sites, and can only be composted in the handful of anaerobic digesters which exist in Britain, but which do not take any packaging. In addition, if Pla is sent to UK recycling works in large quantities, it can contaminate the waste stream, reportedly making other recycled plastics unsaleable.

Last year Innocent drinks stopped using Pla because commercial composting was "not yet a mainstream option" in the UK.

Anson, one of Britain's largest suppliers of plastic food packaging, switched back to conventional plastic after testing Pla in sandwich packs. Sainsbury's has decided not to use it, saying Pla is made with GM corn. "No local authority is collecting compostable packaging at the moment. Composters do not want it," a spokesman said.

Britain's supermarkets compete to claim the greatest commitment to the environment with plant-based products. The bioplastics industry expects rising oil prices to help it compete with conventional plastics, with Europe using about 50,000 tonnes of bioplastics a year.

Concern is mounting because the new generation of biodegradable plastics ends up on landfill sites, where they degrade without oxygen, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. This week the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration reported a sharp increase in global methane emissions last year.

"It is just not possible to capture all the methane from landfill sites," said Michael Warhurt, resources campaigner at Friends of the Earth. "A significant percentage leaks to the atmosphere."

"Just because it's biodegradable does not mean it's good. If it goes to landfill it breaks down to methane. Only a percentage is captured," said Peter Skelton of Wrap, the UK government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme. "In theory bioplastics are good. But in practice there are lots of barriers."

Recycling companies said they would have to invest in expensive new equipment to extract bioplastic from waste for recycling. "If we could identify them the only option would be to landfill them," said one recycler who asked to remain anonymous. "They are not wanted by UK recycling companies or local authorities who refuse to handle them. Councils are saying they do not want plastics near food collection. If these biodegradable [products] get into the recycling stream they contaminate it.

"It will get worse because the government is encouraging more recycling. There will be much more bioplastic around."

Problems arise because some bioplastics are "home" compostable and recyclable. "It's so confusing that a Pla bottle looks exactly the same as a standard Pet bottle," Skelton said. "The consumer is not a polymer expert. Not nearly enough consideration has gone into what they are meant to do with them. Everything is just put in the recycling bin."

Yesterday NatureWorks accepted that its products would not fully break down on landfill sites. "The recycling industry in the UK has not caught up with other countries" said Snehal Desai, chief marketing officer for NatureWorks. "We need alternatives to oil. UK industry should not resist change. We should be designing for the future and not the past. In central Europe, Taiwan and elsewhere, NatureWorks polymer is widely accepted as a compostable material."

Other users said it was too soon to judge the new technology. "It's very early days," said Reed Paget, managing director of Belu. "The UK packaging industry does not want competition. It's shortsighted and is blocking eco-innovation." Belu collects its bottles and now sends them to mainland Europe.

"People think that biodegradable is good and non-biodegradable is bad. That's all they see," said Chris Goodall, environmental analyst and author of How to Live a Low-carbon Lifestyle. "I have been trying to compost bags that are billed as 'biodegradable' and 'home compostable' but I have completely failed. They rely on the compost heap really heating up but we still find the residues."

Bioplastics compete for land with biofuels and food crops. About 200,000 tonnes of bioplastics were produced last year, requiring 250,000-350,000 tonnes of crops. The industry is forecast to need several million acres of farmland within four years.

There is also concern over the growing use by supermarkets of "oxy-degradable" plastic bags, billed as sustainable. They are made of conventional oil-based plastic, with an additive that enables the plastic to break down. The companies promoting it claim it reduces litter and causes no methane or harmful residues. They are used by Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut and KFC in the US, and Tesco and the Co-op in the UK for "degradable" plastic carrier bags.

Some environmentalists say the terminology confuses the public. "The consumer is baffled," a Wrap briefing paper said. "It considers these products degradable but ... they will not degrade effectively in [the closed environment of] a landfill site."

A spokesman for Symphony Plastics disputed that. "Oxy-bioplastic can be re-used and recycled, but will degrade and disappear in a short timescale", he said.

Need for international regulatory harmonisation in trade of genetically modified foods

Regulating the trade of genetically modified foods
Author: P.S. Mehta
Publisher: Consumer Unity and Trust Society, India, 2008

Full text of document: http://www.pradeepsmehta.com/Presentations/Policy_Dialogue.doc

The need for international regulatory harmonisation for balancing global trade in biosafety and biotechnology products has been the focus of attention among various stakeholders both at the national and international level. There are three agreements claiming to be rule-making bodies, which include the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Agreements, the Cartagena Biodiversity Protocol, Codex Alimentarious that address the products, including its trans-boundary movements.

The author of this short paper argues that although all the three agreements are relevant, their objectives differ, which have resulted in constant conflicts among divergent approaches in some respect or the other. In no case, till date, is there a clear hierarchy of regimes established, leaving enormous ambiguity among governments, producers and consumers about the definitive global rules vis-ý-vis the regulation of Genetically Modified (GM) foods and crops.

This paper considers:

•

US-EU Biotech Trade Dispute

•

growing Ambiguity and Its Implications

•

towards International Regulatory Harmonisation

The document concludes that lack of conclusive scientific evidence on the actual or potential impact of GM foods on human health and environment will prolong this debate, leaving enormous ambiguity among governments, producers and consumers about the definitive global rules vis-ý-vis the regulation of GM foods and crops.

Trade war brewing over US biofuel subsidies
EU producers demand duties on 'splash and dash' imports

The Guardian (UK). By David Gow.

Brussels -- European biodiesel producers triggered a fresh transatlantic trade war yesterday by urging the EU to impose punitive duties on cheap imports from the US.

Low-priced imports of biofuels, as part of the so-called "splash and dash" trade, are putting many European producers out of business, the industry group claims.

Their American rivals immediately hit back by urging the federal government to take action against any protective measures for the European industry. The row comes as oil prices have risen to new highs this week, close to $120 (£60) a barrel, and world food prices have surged partly as a result of pressure on land from biofuel production.

The European Biodiesel Board (EBB) said it had lodged a complaint with the European commission over competition from the US that was putting EU producers out of business. It wants duties on "B99" biodiesel exports (biodiesel with 1% petroleum diesel), claiming they are unfairly subsidised and then dumped in the EU, where they can win new subsidies.

US biodiesel exports are subsidised by up to $300 a tonne. Some trading firms have also been shipping biofuels to the US, where they add a "splash" of mineral diesel to qualify for the subsidy and then send the fuel back to the EU. These exports have risen dramatically since last year, causing what the EBB calls "severe injury" to European producers.

This month D1 Oils, a leading but loss-making UK producer, said it would shut all its British refining operations as a direct result of cheap imports. D1 said the economics of the business were now so poor that it would be lucky to make much on the disposal of its sites.

Elliott Mannis, D1 Oils' chief executive, said it was "extremely frustrating" that the company had been forced to bow out of refining because nothing had been done to stop the deluge of B99 biodiesel from the US. "It's an unbelievable situation and there is no end in sight," he added.

Brussels sources indicated the EBB had a strong case on the face of it. It is understood that Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, and Susan Schwab, the US federal trade envoy, have held talks on the issue, but failed to reach a deal.

Mandelson's spokesman said: "We've had extensive contacts with the EBB over several months. We're glad that they have finally submitted their request and will examine it thoroughly ... We will not tolerate unfair trade."

But Manning Feraci, vice-president of federal affairs at the National Biodiesel Board in the US, said: "It is hypocritical for the EBB to cry foul while they benefit from a blatant trade barrier." EU biodiesel fuel specifications were discriminatory and breached World Trade Organisation rules, he said, threatening to lodge a counter-complaint with Schwab.

The EU and US are embroiled in several high-profile and long-standing trade wars, including over beef and poultry imports from the US, genetically modified seeds and foods and, above all, subsidies for the rival plane-makers Airbus and Boeing.

This latest row comes as the US is stepping up biodiesel production as an antidote to dependence on imported crude, while the EU is having second thoughts about its target of using biofuels for 10% of transport fuels by 2020 because of the impact on food prices and land use.

The commission has 45 days to examine the EBB complaint and a further nine months to impose provisional duties - unless Mandelson and Schwab, desperately but forlornly trying to revive the stalled Doha round of WTO talks on trade liberalisation, can cut a deal.

Struggling to find an appetite for cloned meat

New Scientist, 26 April 2008. By Sharon Oosthoek.

[Extract only]

LIVESTOCK auctions are not normally the stuff of headlines, but then it's not every day that cows as unusual as Dundee Paradise and Dundee Paratrooper are going under the hammer. The dairy cows were due to be sold at Easter Compton cattle market near Bristol, UK, last month, but at the last minute their owner withdrew them, reportedly unsettled by negative media coverage and local opposition.

The problem? The cows' mother was a clone, conceived in a laboratory from a cell taken from the ear of a prize-winning Holstein in Wisconsin. "A cow created in Frankenstein's lab," as one local newspaper put it.

This episode was one of the opening skirmishes in what is shaping up to be a battle on par with that over genetically modified food. This time the issue is the production of meat and milk from cloned animals.

On one side are the livestock ...

Read the article.

Unnecessary need

New Scientist, 26 April 2008.

Deborah Keith of Syngenta quickly reveals a key reason why multinational corporations like Syngenta are by their nature ill-equipped to contribute usefully to discussions of global agriculture and food security (5 April, p 17). She refers, without comment, to "the increased demand for meat that comes with rising incomes". It is understandable that such a company will see everything in terms of meeting (and implicitly encouraging) a need, but the need itself must be called into question. No company with a vested interest in promoting such needs is likely to offer arguments as to why those needs might be insupportable, or suggest strategies for reducing them.

Meat, for example, and particularly red meat, is not something that humans need in any quantity at all, especially in the developed world where so many other dietary options are available. Its consumption is - as Keith acknowledges - mostly symbolic of affluence and status. It is a luxury the planet can no longer afford.

It will be a formidable challenge to change cultural assumptions and aspirations to acknowledge this, but change they must. Return that grain now committed to feeding animals to its best application - as food for people - and there would be more than enough for everyone and no need for genetically modified contrivances.

Rather than merely seeking to meet increased "needs" of this kind - an equation that can never balance - we need scientists, and communities at large, to challenge the needs themselves. If companies such as Syngenta are incapable of doing that, as Keith's arguments demonstrate, those discussions are much better off without them.

Kenya: Biosafety Bill gives consumers and farmers more powers

Africa Science News Service, 26 April 2008. By Dancun Mboyah.

The recent publication of the amended Biosafety Bill 2007 that is due for tabling in parliament has now given consumers and farmers more voice to protect their interest as the country gears to legalize the use of genetically modified foods.

In the new amended Bill, the number of consumers and farmers representatives in the National Biosafety Authority has been increased to 2 each from the earlier recommended one.

According to the National Council of Science and Technology (NCST), the new Bill has also created compensation fund that will take care of damages to any person for any injury caused to him, his property or any of his interests.Ý

The period within which the authorities communicate to such a person upon receiving his or her complains has been reduced from 270 days to 150 days.Ý

Among other raft of amendments are those giving the Minister in charge of science and technology powers to make regulations that will govern identifications of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Ý The Bill also seeks to create is the National Biosafety Authority that will be responsible for suing, entering into contracts and doing all acts necessary for the proper performance of its functions.Ý

The authority will take over the role of the National Biosafety Committee (NBC) that is currently involved in overseeing work around GMOs.Ý

The Bill is now with the Attorney General, who is expected to publish it in the Kenya Gazette before it is taken to parliament for enactment.Ý

"We are waiting for the formation of agriculture committee in parliament so that the Bill could be presented for deliberations after 21 days of its publishing in the official government gazette," says Mr. Harrison Macharia of NCST.

In the meantime the council is in the process of engaging legislators in embrace on them to fast tracking the Bills enactment.Ý

Late last year, President Mwai Kibaki dissolved parliament on the very day the voting on the bill was expected to be made into law.

Earlier the bill had gone through the two mandatory readings where it sailed through without a hitch.

Ý Dr. Margaret Karembu, the Director of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) says the Bill will provide a framework for handling or doing research on biotechnology products.

Ý "With the law in place, sneaking of GMO products into the country will be impossible as it will safeguard against the risks to human health and the environment."Ý

Once passed into law, the Bill will help regulate GMOs in the country, making Kenya the second country in Africa (after South Africa) to have a biosafety law in place as required by the Cartegena protocol.Ý

Likewise, the enactment of the Bill will give scientists at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) authority to conduct open field trials on GMO crops such as maize, sweet potato, cassava and cotton.

Ý KARI scientists have already conducted successful research under confined fields in maize and cotton and are now waiting for the Bill to become law to do so in open fields.Ý

Although the technology has generated a lot of controversy, scientists say GMO science is a major innovation of the 21st century and is expected to be a powerful tool against disease, hunger, poverty and environmental degradation.

Ý They argue that delay to pass the Bill is counterproductive since the country had many qualified scientists on biotechnology who have already in search of greener pastures elsewhere.

Ý According to them, biotechnology is, by and large, a science that could lead to social, economic, ethical and legal opportunities and risks like any other.Ý

"African Biotechnology Stakeholders Forum (ABSF) endorsed the use of appropriate agricultural genetically modification because of its conviction that it offers higher yields and better ways of crop and livestock husbandry to farmers", says Prof. Norah Olembo, the organization's Executive Director.

Ý She says that genetically improved foods provide higher nutritional value and better taste for consumers.

Ý ABSF maintains that the safety of genetic modification and its products must be insured through tight scientific scrutiny and strong regulatory policies, she says.

Ý The Chief Executive of the Seed Trade Association of Kenya (STAK) Mr. Obongo Nyachae says that the enactment of the bill will be beneficial to some seed companies that will be involved in processing and marketing of GMOs seeds.

Ý Due to the increased movement of seeds across the porous border, the Bill is the only safeguard for traditional seeds as it will stop contamination.

Ý The government recently suspended the sale of maize from South Africa, after lab results presented by civil society groups indicated that samples of the maize were contaminated by MON810, a seed variety that is believed to be genetically modified.Ý

Dr. Chagema Kedera, Director of the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS), said the government would be conducting additional testing to prove whether the claims are true.ÝÝ

25 April 2008

European Parliament: Opinions differ on causal link between strict GMO authorisation policy and high price of feed

Agence Europe, 25 April 2008.

Brussels -- On Wednesday 23 April in Strasbourg, the European Parliament was divided over the link of cause and effect between the EU's strict policy for authorising genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the difficulties currently encountered by farmers raising cattle, pigs and poultry for obtaining animal feed.

Speaking on behalf of the committee on agriculture and rural development, British Conservative Struan Stevenson (who replaced the committee chairman, Neil Parish, at the beginning of the oral question) stressed that pig and poultry farmers are not subsidised by EU farm aid and that it is therefore necessary to ensure they have access to competitive feed around the world at competitive prices. In Europe, "we take over two years on average to license a perfectly safe GM product", he bemoaned, citing the example of Herculex maize for which it took 33 months to conclude Community marketing procedure compared to 15 in the United States. "There is no excuse for this. With food prices and costs for the poultry and pig industry both rising, we cannot afford this time delay in licensing feed. We have to speed things up", he said.

Mr Stevenson denounced the EU's "zero tolerance" policy on the chance presence of GMOs which has resulted in "dramatically reducing the amount of non-GM feed coming into the EU". He took the example of a cargo of non-GMO soya loaded onto a vessel in Brazil to be transported to the EU. There is the risk that a tiny trace of transgenic soya contaminates the crates of GMO-free soya at the time of loading in the port in Brazil. Once the vessel arrives at the EU port, although this tiny trace of GMO soya is in the soya cargo that is not supposed to contain GMOs, the whole cargo is sent back to Brazil, Mr Stevenson explains.

Unlike Esther De Lange of the Netherlands, who spoke on behalf of the EPP Group, Bernadette Bourzai (PES, France) challenged the link of cause and effect established between the zero tolerance principle on GMOS and the considerable rise in the price of foodstuffs.

Speaking on behalf of the PES, she said this considerable rise in foodstuff prices is due to several factors combined: a fall in supply due to extreme climatic incidents and the development of biofuels, a rise in demand from emerging countries, and, above all, the unprecedented development of stock exchange speculation on farm markets. "Furthermore, this rise concerns all countries including those that have very flexible legislation on GMOs such as the United States", she commented. It is, however, true that European farmers are experiencing "great difficulty" due to the EU's "great dependence" on massive imports of animal feed. In order to reduce this dependence, Ms Bourzai suggests two roads of action: 1) "do everything" to safeguard the last European crops of dried fodder and high protein crops; 2) reflect on ways to diversify supply sources. There is a supply of non-GMO feed in third countries. "I would finally like to point out that most European citizens are asking for the right to procure food products free of GMOs", she concluded, requesting modification of the labeling rules for meat from animals fed with GMO feed in order to respect consumers' rights.

Caroline Lucas, of Britain, said on behalf of the Greens/EFA Group, that the attempt to establish a link between the rise in feed and EU rules on GMOs is "completely false and disingenuous". She sought to give reassurance by referring to a report from DG Agriculture which, according to the worst scenario, provides for Brazil to rapidly market a variety of transgenic soya which is not approved in the EU. There is no proof that Brazil is contemplating doing this, however. Jean-Pierre Audy (EPP-ED, France) pointed out that the EU is greatly dependent on imports of protein-rich feed. He also said that the quality of our customs system has deteriorated greatly.

The Commission acknowledges that asynchronous approvals of GMOS can represent a problem for the availability and cost of feed imports, said Androulla Vassiliou, European Health Commissioner. The Commission's efforts are targeted at addressing some of the key factors behind this issue, both at internal level, through the authorisation of new GMOs in the full respect of the EU legislative framework, and at international level, through discussions with major trading partners.

The Commission recalled that it had recently adopted the authorisation of GA21 maize, which will facilitate imports with the advantageous presence of this GM even from Argentina. Also, the Commission is to suggest that the Council accept a genetically modified soya that should open the way to further imports of cattle feed.
_______________________

Ireland: Kevin Myers fails logic test on GM

Irish Independent, letter to the editor, 25 April 2008.

I am surprised to see that Kevin Myers did not apply the logic he advocates in his article in support of GM food production (Irish Independent, April 23) to his own analysis.

If he is worried that human intervention would disrupt the wonderful natural working of the market (which he describes as "nature at its purest"), how much more concerned should he be about human intervention in plan's' DNA and the widespread use of GM seeds in open-field for GM food production.

As he sharply points out, the consequences of interfering with the laws of nature are "too complex and unpredictable" for "anyone to manage."

Nathalie Lerendu-Brand
Rutledge Terrace
Dublin 8

UK: Food Miles professor calls for shift in food culture at Real Food debate

Farmers Weekly Interactive, 25 April 2008. By Julian Gairdner.

Food Miles professor Tim Lang has called for a dramatic shift in the world's attitude to food consumption and production and slammed genetically modified food as promising too much.

Speaking at the Real Food debate at Earls Court, London last night, Prof Lang said it was beginning to dawn on people that something significant needed to change if the world was to feed itself over the next century.

Responding to concerns about rising food prices and tightening supplies, he said: "The debate is being dominated by a crisis mentality. The myth is there isn't enough food to feed people. There is plenty but it is maldistributed."

But while there had been food shortages before, this time something more significant had changed, he believed. "We've had crises before. It's perfectly plausible to argue this is a temporary shift. But the reason most of us think that is wrong is because the new landscape is about eight fundamentals."

Eight fundamentals

The eight fundamentals were, he said: Land, labour, energy (oil), water, demographics, health/nutrition (including diet changes to more meat and dairy consumption), climate change, and price/cost.

It was too simplistic to take one or two of these in isolation he told Farmers Weekly after the debate. "We've got to have a policy framework addressing all these fundamentals. The difficulty is what to do. The danger is people are looking for instant easy solutions. Complex problems don't have simple solutions, they have complex multi-layered solutions."

GM food, he claimed, was not the answer. "There's a probability of GM offering a solution to what it cannot resolve. It cannot resolve water and energy shortages. It cannot resolve health. It cannot resolve the impacts of climate change. It might tweak a bit here and there. GM is a side issue. It doesn't address the real fundamentals. Most uses of GM are to preserve the agrochemical market."

Food policy makers at global, regional, national and local level were beginning to address the subtleties of what needed to happen, Prof Lang said.

But, he added, the devolved administrations of the UK had got a much better grasp of this than Gordon Brown's government. The prime minister needed to concentrate on resolving some of the fundamentals at home rather than talking about global poverty.

"The British food system is operating as though we have six planets - six times our ecological footprint. There's a lot of waste. We have not got the planet space to feed the world like the British do. We now know the brutal indicators for the future, but we're just fiddlingÝwhile Rome burns."

Local not organic Ý

Cheap food is not cheap. Society pays twice thanks to the "political system, subsidies and policies", says environmental campaigner Zac Goldsmith. Ý

"We pay £250m a year to clear pesticides out of water. If you had an even playing field where the polluter pays, you would find the so-called niche food we have today would not be quite so niche." Ý

But, he said, that did not necessarily mean organic. "I cannot understand why the government isn't putting more into local food. We sell as much poultry meat to the Netherlands as we buy from the Netherlands - that's madness. We should have a bias of bringing the food economy home wherever possible." Ý

Ý And he added: "The moment the government recognises we need to follow a policy of food security, we've got it made - everything else falls into place."

UK: Food festival begins on downbeat note as experts warn of world shortage

The Guardian, 25 April 2008.

Global food shortages are a problem "greater than climate change," a panel of leading food industry and environmental experts warned last night.

The audience gathered for a debate on the nature of Britain's food culture at the Real Food festival was forced into sombre reflection as it was told the days of cheap western produce had gone, unlikely to return anytime soon.

Food policy expert Professor Tim Lang frequently stressed he was an optimist ‚ but said the mood among his colleagues was universally grim.

"We are entering a new paradigm, a new era. And when I have to think about the issues we are facing, I am very sober ‚ indeed."

Waitrose's managing director, Mark Price, went further, describing the rapid impact of changes in agriculture such as switching food crops for biofuel: "We can't feed the planet the way we are growing, the way we are eating. It's a much bigger issue than climate change."

It had started gently enough. Delegates joining the discussion were treated to some pondering on the meaning of "real" food, a little well-natured Delia and Jamie-bashing and questioning of the benefits of the upsurge in TV "gastroporn".

London's Earls Court conference hall had been transformed into a giant farmer's market for the four-day festival ‚ crammed with beautifully rustic stalls of "welfare-friendly veal," organic wines and beers, £4 bottles of olive oil, handmade cheeses and children's sweets made from goat's milk.

Some people attending the debate apologised for late arrival, admitting "quaffing champagne and oysters" as the reason for their tardiness.

But the banner bearing the name of benefiting charity Action Against Hunger hanging above the panel was always going to be a reminder of the more pressing matter hovering over all ‚ and some rather guilty middle-class self-examination.

Panel chair, food journalist and presenter Richard Johnson, burst the bubble: "I can walk around here today and get a £35/lb jamon Iberico [cured Spanish ham]. But are we just fiddling while Rome burns? Do we have the right priorities?" he asked, referring to the recent food riots which have ripped around the globe from Haiti and Thailand to Africa and Mexico and a week in which the prime minister, Gordon Brown, called for international action on food prices.

"It's a myth that there's not enough food. There's plenty of food to go around, there's more than enough to feed the world's population. It's simply maldistribution," Lang said.

An adviser to the government's Commission on Sustainable Development and the World Health Organisation, Lang and others say the current crisis was triggered by eight different factors.

One of these is the historic relationship between modern food production and distribution and cheap oil ‚ in transportation, packing and fertilisers - a marriage now obviously under strain.

"It shows the impact of industrialisation, the shedding of our connection with the land," he said. Although he and Price differed on the ability of the world to feed itself, they agreed on the impact of booming populations, emerging nations and changes in eating behaviour ‚ the so-called "nutrition transition".

The Waitrose head cited the surge in demand for meat and dairy produce, saying by current rates, in a few decades "80% of the world's meat will need to go to China."

The audience had been bombarded with bleak facts ‚ the worst food crisis since the world wars, a doubling in the price of rice and wheat, another 3 billion people estimated to arrive at the world's table by 2040. People started to look a little queasy.

"So what are the solutions?" asked Richard Johnson. Is growing your own a realistic option for most people? Trudie Styler, wife of rock star Sting and ardent organic grower, thought so, but admitted "It's easier for me, I live on a farm."

"The future has a large question mark over it. But there's a simple solution," said environmentalist and Conservative party green adviser Zac Goldsmith, stating a need for sustainable agriculture and for consumers and authorities to support local producers over imported goods.

A comment from the floor demonstrated how political food had become.

"I appreciate what you and Trudie say. But I'm from Peckham - and I'm not sure who my local producer is," said a woman.

Price concluded the likelihood of GM food entering the UK was highly likely "whether we liked it or not." Lang predicted "a rapid acceleration, a new era in the manner we measure and judge food" ‚ saying a water footprint would become equally important as its carbon equivalent.

Even jovial celebrity chef Giorgio Locatelli was pushed into contemplation, defending the role of supermarkets as playing an essential role in ordinary people's diets and lives but admitted "people will have to become more and more aware of what they are putting into their mouths."

Action Against Hunger ambassador Bill Knott had the last word. "The well furnished table has long been the hallmark of great civilisations, but there's millions for whom food is a necessity, not just a luxury."

The Real Food Festival runs until April 27th http://www.realfoodfestival.co.uk/

Seedstocks: Cartels Gain Control of Means of Life

Executive Intelligence Review (USA), 25 April 2008.

The current drive by global "free market" cartels to control the means of life through control of patented seedstocks goes back some 40 years. So today's promising biotechnology and genetic engineering breakthroughs are being nipped in the bud by the imperial cartels, as pliant regulators and lawmakers codify that control. The World Trade Organization was spawned out of the 1994 Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to act as enforcer. The WTO's website boasts that it is "the only global international body dealing with the rules of trade between nations."

The U.S. tradition, under natural law, has been to not patent plants or livestock. As part of that tradition, in the 1920s and 1930s, Henry A. Wallace, founder of Pioneer Hy Bred and FDR's first Secretary of Agriculture, for example, explicitly stated opposition to any form of patenting of seeds.

But in the post-war years, with the "free marketeers" chiseling away at the general welfare protections of the Roosevelt era, five conglomerates came to dominate world seedstocks: Cargill, Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and Syngenta.

The first time any plants were given protection as intellectual property was under the 1930 Plant Patent Act (PPA). This act was designed to protect nurseries and breeders who produced mainly ornamental plants, such as asexually reproduced flowers, and some fruits. The Plant Patent Act did not offer the more strict protection of an industrial patent, but it did protect specific varieties that were created and claimed by the inventor, by restricting others from marketing his variety. The 1930 act specifically prohibited the patenting of any food crop plants, recognizing that these patents could threaten the food supply.

In 1970, the first version of the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) was introduced, which greatly expanded protection to all plants that were distinct and new. This was not a patent, but merely a certificate, which gave protection to specific varieties of crop seeds for the first time, for periods of up to 25 years. Under the PVPA of 1970, farmers and breeders could save and replant protected seed, resell it, and carry out research using it.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, ruling that living organisms could be patented. The decision allowed the patenting of genetically engineered microbes, which opened the door to the patenting of any life form.

In 1985, the U.S. Patent Office ruled that plants could now be protected under the powerful industrial patent. The industrial patent does not have any exemptions for farmers or for research, so any use of a patented plant or seed without specific license from the patent holder would be considered violation of the patent. This patent decision is the basis for the new weapon to control agricultural production and research that the cartels have pushed to the limit.

In 1994, the PVPA was amended in accordance with the regulations under the GATT. The changes to the act made it illegal for farmers to resell or exchange any seed of protected crops. The GATT agreement also forces the developing nations to recognize the patents and protections on plants and living organisms held by other GATT member countries. This allows the cartels to deny developing countries' farmers access to advanced biotechnology, and instead forces them to pay huge licensing fees to use any patented seeds.

Agriculture: What is Really Causing 'Agflation'?

IPS, 25 April 2008. By Mario Osava.

RIO DE JANEIRO -- The old laws of the marketplace are no longer working. Food priceshave been rising for six years because of surging demand, and increased production is not restoring the balance as it used to in the past. In fact, prices have been going up even faster over the last year.

The so-called "financialisation" of commodities markets, that is, the influx of investment funds seeking safer and more lucrative assets, has intensified the trend and "at the moment impinges more than the law of supply and demand," said analyst Fernando Muraro of AgRural, a consultancy firm in Brazil.

There is no way to measure the influence of speculative forces on "agflation," the new term coined to describe inflation provoked by the agricultural sector, he said.

But the role of speculation is undeniable, as commodities funds are involved in 40 percent of the futures and option contracts at the Chicago Stock Exchange, the highest proportion ever. Ten million tons of soybeans were bought in March 2007, compared to 21 million tons last month, Muraro pointed out to IPS.

There is a global excess of dollars, and holders are transferring them to markets and products wherever sustained price increases indicate good prospects for making profits, he said.

José Graziano da Silva, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, echoed Muraro's views in a statement prior to the FAO regional conference, held Apr. 14-18 in Brasilia.

The rising price of food, which exacerbates hunger in the world, is the result of "a speculative attack," he said.

Agricultural prices rose between 2002 and 2006 due to higher food consumption in developing countries, and to crop losses over that period, but since 2007 financial speculation has been responsible for most of the price inflation, according to Graziano da Silva.

In contrast, Sergio Vale, a consultant with MB Asociados, said "it's not true that a financial bubble exists for agricultural commodities." The price increases are "concretely based" on sustained growth of demand in China, India and other Asian countries, as well as in Latin America, he told IPS.

This is a "structural, long term trend," due to greater consumption as incomes have risen in several poor populations, reduction of supply caused by climate problems, and the diversion of several crops, like maize and soybeans, to biofuel production, he said.

Financial participation in the commodities market creates "greater volatility," making prices rise and fall more sharply, but "it is not the decisive factor" in the price increases, he said.

As an example, Vale mentioned the temporary fall in prices of primary products in mid-March because of investment capital flight, caused by the banking crisis in the United States, which nevertheless did not affect the continuing upward trend this year.

To blame the price rises on speculation "is foolish and unrealistic," because there are "clear, fundamental causes that are keeping prices high," said Ricardo Cota, technical manager for the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA), an association of large rural producers.

As well as expansion in demand, Cota said expensive oil-based fuels, the cost of farm inputs, which is also rising, and biofuels are among the fundamental causes of "the new levels of agricultural prices which we will have to learn to live with," given the problems of increasing food supply.

Brazil is an exception, in that it has plenty of land available to expand its agricultural frontier, but its inadequate logistical infrastructure, especially the limited capacity of its ports, stands in the way of a rapid increase in production and exports, he said.

Other limitations are the growing cost of fertilisers, soaring oil prices, and red tape. Ideological" pressure is also blocking progress in biotechnology aimed at boosting productivity by using genetically modified seeds, Cota said.

The cost of fertilisers has doubled since early 2007, and may rise further this year, but in spite of this the high prices of grains, especially maize and soybeans which account for 70 percent of Brazil's total grain production, still ensure healthy profits for farmers, Muraro said.

In his view, financialisation has accentuated the rise in commodity prices to "unprecedented levels," benefiting farmers but also giving them headaches because of the difficulty of setting prices for their produce.

"Prices are no longer set by supply, demand and climate," as they have been skewed by the mass entry of investment funds into the markets, he said.

Market analysis has become more complex, requiring "instruments that are more technical, professional and modern" in order to assess macroeconomic factors like exchange rates, interests and capital flows, Muraro added.

Environmental regulations are the main obstacles preventing a rapid increase in output to balance global demand and supply, he argued.

Flávio Turra, technical manager of the Organisation of Cooperatives of the State of Paraná (OCEPAR), said that financial speculation plays a "relatively small part" in determining prices, although "anyone following the market must always take into account the participation of investment funds."

Such flighty capital may accelerate trends, but the underlying price increases are basically due to shortages in world stocks and to the imbalance created by the steep increase in consumption in countries like China and, more recently, India, he said.

The swift rise in prices at present is also due to countries banning or surtaxing exports in order to control inflation and secure domestic food supplies, as Argentina has done in the case of wheat, he maintained.

Brazil has just suspended exports of government-owned rice, amounting to close to 1.5 million tons, although it has not imposed any export restrictions on the private sector. However, the quantity of rice that could be sold by private farmers would barely make a dent in the world shortage, he said.

Recovery of world food stocks may take five or six years, even with prices well above the historical average, Turra concluded.

One exception to the general upward trend in food prices is sugar. More than ample production is bringing retail prices down, in spite of Brazil's increased ethanol manufacturing and the fact that the food and biofuel sectors compete in this country for the same raw material, sugarcane.

This example contradicts the wave of accusations that biofuel production is to blame for sparking the food price crisis.

A World Hungry For Real Solutions

Press & Dakotan / Yangton Daily (USA), 25 April 2008. By Lisa Hare.

Recently, I was asked what I thought about the food riots taking place and my immediate response was, We should be rioting over fuel expenses. Consumers hearing of record high grain prices automatically link that to higher grocery store receipts, but what the vast majority doesn't understand about the increasing prices of food is, that money doesn't go to the farmers.

As the price of a barrel of crude oil hit a record price of $112 on futures markets last week, economists reported the energy factor is pushing up food transportation and production costs.

Although grain producers are faring better, profit forecasts for other major farm businesses -- particularly livestock production -- predict average net cash incomes to fall below those of 2007 with dairy, hog and cattle operations taking the biggest hits. At this point, with doubling and tripling input costs, farmers are simply trading bigger dollars, and in some cases taking even less to the bank.

Locally, farmers are gearing up for planting. For many, it's the best time of year -- all the possibilities still lie ahead.

But with short grain reserves, world-wide; acknowledgment of the potential impacts of global climate change; increasing world population and higher demands placed on already-pressured resources of soil and water, the bigger picture of the important role of agriculture is more evident than ever before.

Famine is a word we're seeing more and more now.

Most of us here in the U.S. have led mostly privileged lives where the word "famine" is both historic and foreign. It carries biblical connotations, implying something ancient and long-gone, like the practice of animal sacrifice and public stoning.

Or it is associated with those unfortunate souls born to undeveloped nations, like the children in Africa we know only on TV -- bony limbs, distended bellies, flies circling.

If we want to find the real culprit behind food price increases contributing to global hunger and increased threat of famine -- food riots -- we need to look further than the domestic farmer.

We can look to the petroleum conglomerates that provide the fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides and fuel upon which world-trading, industrialized agriculture is dependent. We can thank the biotech industry driving genetically modified (GM) crops that, by no accident, further feeds the petroleum industry by producing crops that are genetically dependent upon these petroleum-based products.

There's a common argument now that we need GMO crops to feed the world -- without it, we won't have high enough yields to match demand. But studies are showing the converse is actually true. The more input-dependent crops we use, the more inputs are required to maintain the same yields as soil quality diminishes and carbon emissions increase. So relying on the necessity of exogenous, purchased inputs to produce food cannot solve, or keep up with, the culminating problems that have us using the word "famine" more.

To think that our technological advances can usurp environmental issues is like using a gold-plated, digitally-enhanced, hydrolic-lift bucket to dip water from a well that's running dry. We've got lots of bucket men out there -- very powerful, convincing ones -- promoting the improved efficiencies and superior quality and absolute necessity of the golden buckets. And while we all clamor for ways and means to acquire more and bigger buckets to draw our fair share of the water, we remain blind to the reality of the true issue, which is the limits of the well.

Thomas Kostigen's Ethics Monitor:
A New Look At Genetically Modified Organisms

Dow Jones Newswire, 25 April 2008.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- The price of rice is so high that Sam's Club is limiting the amount people can buy.

As the food crisis worsens around the world, even reaching now the very top of the food chain -- people in the United States -- drastic measures are being taken. Meanwhile, solutions are being scavenged at the very bottom: genetically modified organism (GMOs) are being looked at anew.

GMOs can be all sorts of things: plants, animals -- even us, under the true definition of the label. Anything whose construct has been re-engineered from that which is natural becomes genetically engineered, or "modified."

The engineering I am referring to has to do with seeds and plants. They in turn become the biggest source of food on the planet: agricultural products. Typically agricultural products are engineered to be more resistant to pests or environmental conditions or to grow more quickly and bountifully.

The good things about GMOs are that you can grow more using less land in shorter amounts of time and in adverse conditions. The bad things about GMOs are their unforeseen consequences: What's their effect on biodiversity? (For example, will GMO crops corrupt the pollination of other varieties and species?) And, well, what's the effect of GMO food on us?

As the world is running short of food, more attention is being given to GMOs to perhaps save the day. Indeed, on Monday, The New York Times reported: " Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops."

Businesses such as Monsanto (MON), DuPont (DD) and Cargill, among others, stand to gain the most because they are the biggest producers of genetically modified products. Monsanto said its quarterly profit more than doubled due largely to corn seed sales. DuPont's quarterly profit rose more than 25%, and Cargill's profit reportedly soared 86% on demand for its products.

Trade policy should address the concerns of developing nations that are forced to rely on GM products to feed their people, yet are then held virtually hostage to these producers. Some GM seed licenses expire, meaning farmers are forced to buy from the same company over and over. In other cases GM seeds have been reported to infect farmland preventing other, natural strains from being grown.

Profiting on the poor

It isn't fair that big companies will profit off the world's most vulnerable, poor and starving -- and not because of free markets but because of unfair markets.

Many countries in Europe and Africa have opposed GM products, much to the chagrin of manufacturers in the U.S. The opposition even spawned a controversial ruling two years ago by the World Trade Organization that the European Union broke trade rules by barring GM foods (dubbed "Frankenfoods" by many Europeans) and seeds. This, many claim, opened the door for the U.S. to force African nations to accept GM imports. "Politically, I think it is very clear that the U.S. will try and use this case to force GMOs into African markets. American industry is already saying that the result is a signal to the rest of the world. They are implying that while the EU may be able to resist an outlawing of national bans on GMOs, developing countries will not and will have to open their markets," Reuters quoted Daniel Mittler, trade adviser at Greenpeace International, as saying at the time.

The world may be even more out of balance now when it comes to food and agriculture prices. That doesn't mean fair trade has to be tossed too. This is the time when we need it most. If you thought the oil dilemma was bad -- wait until the food crisis really kicks in.

Sure, there will be ample room for companies to profit -- just like the oil companies have done. But companies responsible for people's lives through the seeds they provide should look at responsibility differently.

GMOs can hold great benefits. However, they must be sold and distributed with a sense of conscience, or not at all.

Green Genes

Science magazine, 25 April 2008. By Laura M. Zahn, Pamela J. Hines, Elizabeth Pennisi, John Travis.

The finished sequences of the flowering plants Arabidopsis, rice, poplar, and grape; the moss Physcomitrella, and the algae Chlamydomonas have begun to allow us to understand how plant genomes share common ground with the genomes of other organisms and how they differ. In this special section, along with an online collection (www.sciencemag.org/plantgenomes), we see how current knowledge of plant genomes lends insights to investigations from biochemistry to ecosystems. Taking a comparative view of plant genomes, DellaPenna and Last (p. 479) consider how metabolic pathways are encoded in the genomes and are derived from a complex evolutionary history. Leitch and Leitch (p. 481) discuss why polyploidy is so common in plants and its evolutionary and ecological consequences. Gaut and Ross-Ibarra (p. 484) examine the evolutionary constraints on a plant's genome, with a particular focus on how genomes enlarge or shrink without changing their number of chromosomes. Tang et al. (p. 486) look at the consequences of these changes over time and how to uncover genomic changes through the examination of synteny and collinearity. Zhang (p. 489) examines the genomic landscape of epigenetics in plants. In an ecological context, Whitham et al. (p. 492) explore how the genome of a single keystone species affects interactions across communities and ecosystems. Benfey and Mitchell-Olds (p. 495) examine gene regulation from a systems network perspective and consider how natural variation and environmental inputs affect the phenotype of an individual.

Plant genomics also brings the promise of improving crops through transgenic manipulations. But genetically modified (GM) plants have teetered between success and failure, with ethical and regulatory challenges, as well as public concerns. On p. 466 and in the online collection, Youngsteadt lays out the stats on the world's GM harvests. While GM corn and soybeans have proliferated, golden rice, engineered to combat malnutrition, has languished, Enserink reports (p. 468). As Stokstad points out (p. 472), GM papaya still struggles for worldwide acceptance, even after 10 years on the market.

Two teams have deciphered the grape's genetic code, but whether GM wine will be accepted is a lingering question, says Travis (p. 475). Kintisch explores how plant genomics can advance biofuel agriculture (p. 478). Finally, Kaiser describes how some researchers bent on using GM plants to make human proteins and other pharmaceutical products are moving indoors to allay safety concerns (p. 473).

In addition to these overviews, see the associated Editorial by Fedoroff and the Science Careers article by Williams, as well as reports by Field and Osbourn (p. 543), Baerenfaller et al. (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1157956/DC1), and Dinneny et al. (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1153795/DC1). Given what has been learned so far from a variety of plant genomes, we eagerly look ahead to a growing field.

[For page reference links go to http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5875/465

Biotech Bets on Agrofuels

Americas Program, Center for International Policy, 24 April 2008. By Carmelo Ruiz Marrer.

Extract only: see full article: http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5179

There is a new participant in the international deliberations on global warming and agrofuels: the biotechnology industry. The corporate giants of the genetics industry propose new technologies, including genetically modified trees, second generation cellulosic ethanol, and synthetic biology, to wean society off fossil fuels and fight climate change.

The implications for Latin America are breathtaking. The biotechnology industry's massive move into the energy sector brings together major social and ecological issues in the region, such as agrofuel promotion, genetically modified (GM) crops, and the growth of agribusiness monocultures. Latin American civil society's aspirations of land reform, environmental protection, alternatives to neoliberalism, and food and energy sovereignty, are at stake.

Biotechnology companies have become some of the main movers in promoting the use of farm crops like corn, soy, and sugar cane to make fuel for motor vehicles. Faced with increasing public resistance to human consumption of their GM crops, the biotech industry sees its salvation in the production of GM agrofuels.

By portraying GM crops as the answer to climate change and resource depletion caused by fossil fuels, they hope to cast a more favorable light on biotech plants.

They have a lot at stake: Monsanto, for example, obtains 60% of its revenue from the sale of GM seeds. Riding the tide of the biofuels boom, Monsanto and other companies hope to avoid the human health concerns associated with GM food crops and open up a whole new area of profit from the global warming crisis.

Public Sentiment Against GM Crops

GM organisms contain genetic codes (genomes) that have been altered by genetic engineeringóan unprecedented procedure that creates genetic combinations not possible in nature. The main GM products in the U.S. market are corn and soy, which have been genetically modified for resistance to herbicides (usually Monsanto's Roundup) or to pests (known as Bt crops). These crops are used mostly to feed farm animals and to make additives (such as sweeteners and starch) present in most processed foods.

In spite of the upbeat propaganda of the biotechnology companies, broad sectors of society reject GM products, claiming they are neither safe nor necessary. Thousands of protesters from all over the world swamped three United Nations events that took place in southern Brazil almost simultaneously in March 2006: the biennial conferences of the Biodiversity Convention and the Biosafety Protocol, and the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Local Development. Prominent among their demands was a ban on GM crops.

As the meetings and protests took place, activists of the MST, Brazil's landless people's movement, seized a farm in the state of Parana where the Syngenta biotechnology corporation had illegally planted GM corn and soy in the buffer zone of the IguaÁu National Park. On Oct. 21, 2007 armed gunmen violently evicted them, wounding many and murdering 34 year-old Valmir "Keno" Mota de Oliveira, father of three. The MST, VÌa Campesina, and countless civil society organizations in Brazil have condemned these acts. They demand that Syngenta take responsibility for the killing, that it be held accountable for its environmental violations, close down its experimental plot, and leave the country.

In February 2007, farmers and animal herders, representatives of civil society groups, social movements, and environmentalists from 17 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe met in Mali to discuss food and farming issues. Together they issued the Bamako Declaration, which, among other things, categorically says NO to genetically modified organisms.

The Bamako Declaration was part of the preparatory process for the World Forum for Food Sovereignty, which took place that same week in Mali. Over 500 men and women from more than 80 countries, and representing organizations of peasants/family farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, youth, consumers, and environmental and urban movements, drafted the Nyeleni Declaration.

The declaration rejects GM foods: (We fight against) "technologies and practices that undercut our future food-producing capacities, damage the environment, and put our health at risk. These include transgenic crops and animals, terminator technology, industrial aquaculture and destructive fishing practices, the so-called White Revolution of industrial dairy practices, the so-called 'old' and 'new' Green Revolutions, and the "Green Deserts" of industrial bio-fuel monocultures and other plantations."

In March 2008, around 300 women of the MST destroyed a nursery of GM corn seedlings belonging to Monsanto in the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo to protest the government's biosafety council's approval of plantings of GM corn. In the days that followed, some 1,500 women protested in front of several Syngenta properties in the state of Parana. See rest of article: http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5179

Mexico: Native land recovery leader wins 'Green Nobel'

IPS News Via Acquire Media NewsEdge, 24 April 2008.

MEXICO CITY -- Biotech corporations that developed genetically modified seeds are bribing authorities and carrying out costly advertising campaigns "in order to create monsters that attack life," said Jesús León Santos, an indigenous Mexican farmer.

The 42-year-old farmer, who has led land recovery projects inspired by traditional indigenous knowledge since he was 18, was awarded this year's Goldman Environmental Prize. The annual prize, known widely as the "Green Nobel," is given out by the U.S.-based Goldman Environmental Foundation on Apr. 14.

"We showed them that the cultivation techniques of our ancestors are the best and that they represent life. We are on the right path," León Santos said.

León Santos's program is active in an impoverished Mixteca indigenous region of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, one of the most badly eroded areas of the world, according to the United Nations. The region also spews out large numbers of migrants.

The Mixteca Small Farmer Integral Development Center, headed by León Santos, has planted about 4 million trees in the area, while developing rainwater collection systems and promoting traditional crops. Some 400 indigenous families have benefited directly from the projects, in which many local residents actively participate.

Most important, they have revived the tradition of the "milpa," a style of agriculture developed by the pre-Hispanic cultures of southern Mexico and Central America, which helps keep soils fertile.

The Mixteca region covers parts of the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Puebla, in southern Mexico, and is home to Mixteca or ?uu savi Indians ("people of the rains"). In Oaxaca it extends across 16,000 square kilometers.

León Santos, who received an award of $150,000 with the Goldman Prize, was this year's representative for the North American region. The other regional winners were Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza of Ecuador, Feliciano dos Santos of Mozambique, Rosa Hilda Ramos of Puerto Rico, Marina Rikhvanova of Russia and Ignace Schops of Belgium.

Tierramérica recently asked León Santos to talk more about his work.

TIERRAMÉRICA: What does it mean to you and your organization to win the Goldman Prize?

JESÚS LEÓN SANTOS: It is the most important thing that has happened to me in a long time. This strengthens ties between us and other people working to conserve the environment, and makes us stronger. The $150,000 will go to a fund in my organization to continue developing our work. Imagine that! It represents the budget of an entire year. We manage some $100,000 that come from European organizations.

TA: To come up with and develop projects like yours in a poor area, with degraded land and high rates of emigration, is an uphill battle. How did you begin?

JLS: I became involved in this because when I was a boy I saw that we faced many difficulties. My parents sent me to look for firewood and I had to walk for hours and hours because it was very scarce. The trees had disappeared.

We wanted the Mixteca region to be green again, like it was in the past, but those were just words because we didn't know what to do. Then things became more clear, and 25 years later we see that we have achieved what we never imagined possible.

TA: What are the most evident changes?

JLS: Many people who come to the area where we work say that it's a paradise, but I point out to them that it is a paradise that has been created little by little. Today we enjoy the woods and the birds that for years we didn't hear singing because there were no trees. The soil is beginning to change. When one walks among the trees, the sound made by our feet on the leaves was something we had never heard before.

TA: What role did the pre-Hispanic techniques for cultivation and land conservation play in these achievements?

JLS: In addition to planting trees and creating ditches to collect rainwater, we pushed the recovery of traditional farming systems, the "milpa," which consists of planting maize, squash, beans and others on the same plot of land, using seeds from our own harvests, without buying anything. This improves fertility and keeps the soil from deteriorating.

Unlike monoculture planting, these systems not only provide a balanced diet but also conserve soil fertility. In the 1970s and 1980s, when fertilizers and improved seeds began to be used here, this traditional indigenous knowledge was left behind. But we have recovered it.

TA: The companies that produce genetically modified seeds are asking Mexico to allow its maize varieties to be planted here because they say they are much more productive. What do you think?

JLS: [Genetically modified] seeds can be monsters in comparison to what nature has created. We can't fool around with what is natural, and those companies are truly creating monsters that attack life, [attacking] not just the native seeds but also ourselves. What I'd tell the seed companies is that they carry out campaigns that are not ethical, because they lie and bribe governments.

TA: But each year there are more and more [genetically modified] crops in the world, and their promoters argue that this technology has come to stay.

JLS: To everyone who thinks that our ancient systems are just a matter of romantic ideals, we say that we are on the right path. What they are proposing is a disaster. When those modified seeds can no longer be controlled, they could cause a global catastrophe.

TA: How should this danger that you see be dealt with?

JLS: We have to do what they do: carry out campaigns. They have an incredible amount of money and can make their million-dollar propaganda, and at times even buy off the authorities to allow them to plant their crops. We have to work in a different way: convince the public and show them that what we are doing is producing and protecting life itself.

(* Originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialized news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Environment Program.)

Greece extends ban on Monsanto Co. biotech maize seeds for another 2 years

Associated Press, 24 April 2008.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Greece on Wednesday renewed its ban on genetically modified maize produced by U.S. biotech giant Monsanto Co., expanding it to include 70 types of seed.

Agriculture Minister Alexandros Kondos said the three-year-old ban on the sale and cultivation of MON810 seeds was extended for two more years.

´The new decision ... is based on the same solid scientific and legal basis (as the last one), but includes new scientific data and findings,ª Kondos said. ´These data concern a potential threat to human health and to the beekeeping industry.

Experts fear pollen from biotech crops, carried by bees, could adversely affect swarms. Greece has some 27,000 beekeepers and accounts for an estimated 16 percent of European Union honey production.

Despite pressure from the European Union, Greece has implemented and extended bans on the MON810 strain since April 2005. The initial ban included 17 types. ´We absolutely oppose the circulation of genetically modified organisms,ª Kondos said.

Kondos said the European Union should allow members states ´enough timeª to assess the threat from the cultivation of genetically modified seeds.

Genetically modified crops are a touchy issue in the EU. The European Food Safety Authority ruled in 2004 that genetically modified products do not constitute a risk to human health or the environment.

But some EU governments _ including Austria, France, Greece, Luxembourg and Germany _ are wary of biotechnology and are fighting to keep the crops from their fields and out of their supermarkets.

´Internationally, there is no study showing that biotech products do not harm humans and the environment,ª Kondos said.

The Greek branch of Greenpeace staged a small protest Wednesday, urging Kondos to include biotech cotton seeds in its ban.

UK and Ireland: Debenhams bans unhealthy ingredients from cafés and restaurants

CatererSearch.com, 24 April 2008.

Department store chain Debenhams today announced that it has banned a number of unhealthy ingredients in all of the food products served at its restaurants and cafés.

The group has removed all hydrogenated fats, genetically modified (GM) ingredients and artificial (azu) colours from the menus at the dining outlets at its 166 stores across the UK and Ireland.Ý

The move comes after Debenhams launched a £5m overhaul of its in-store restaurants earlier this year, including the update of interiors and menus.Ý

Ý Senior food and brand development manager Mark Kent said the move took months to implement.

"Banning hydrogenated fats, GM and azo colours has been on our agenda for some time but the logistics involved in banning every product which contains them are extensive," he said.

Study Based on Farmers' Experience Exposes Risks of GM Crops

Institute of Science in Society press release, 24 April 2008.

The first study of its kind in North America, possibly in the world, shows how the risks of GM technology outweigh the benefits especially in the longer term. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho.

Canada, along with the United States and Argentina were the first countries in the world to commercialise GM crops. But more than a decade later, risk assessment for GM crops is still ignoring farmers' knowledge and their years of experience in growing GM crops.

Ian Mauro and Stéphane McLachlan at the University of Manitoba, Winnepeg, in Canada, have now completed a study of farmers from Manitoba and across Canada based on interviews (n=15) and survey by mail (n=370) conducted between 2002 and 2003. It is especially useful in identifying the actual risks and benefits for farmers who are not yet committed to growing GM crops.Ý

"We're very pleased with this study." Mauro says. "Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we've documented the benefits and risks associated herbicide-tolerant (HT) canola. We found that farmers have been primarily placed at risk due to the proliferation of HT volunteers. Smaller farms and those with a longer history of GM canola use were at highest risk."

Canadian farmers rapidly adopted HT canola following its commercial release in 1995. Three varieties of HT canola have been introduced: Roundup Ready (RR), Liberty Link (LL) and Clearfield (CF), tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, glufosinate and imidazolinone respectively. RR and LL are genetically modified, whereas CF has been created by induced mutation. Currently, they represent 96 percent of the 5.25 million ha of canola grown in Canada: approximately 50 percent RR, 32 percent LL and 14 percent CF. The great majority are grown in the western Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

Thus, Canadian farmers have a great deal of experience in growing HT canola, and that's what Mauro and McLachlan decided to focus on.

Comprehensive study on HT canola across Canada

The aims of their study were to:

•

Evaluate risks of HT canola relative to other risks facing rural communities

•

Characterize the benefits and risks associated with HT canola

•

Identify the factors contributing to the risks and benefits associated with HT canola

•

Explore the role that farmers' knowledge plays in the risk analysis of HT crops and more generally agricultural technology.

Initial interviews were conducted in the Canadian Prairies Ecozone, which includes the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, characterized by a continental climate having short warm summers and long cold winters, with an annual mean temperature range from 1.5 C to 3.5 C. The mean annual precipitation is 504.4 mm.

The mail survey of the study covered two ecoregions: Lake Manitobe Plain (LMP) and Aspen Parkland (AP), which dominate southern Manitoba. The average growing season for both ecoregions ranges from 173 to 187 days and the soils are predominantly 'Black Chernozemic' a black soil rich in organic matter. The LMP is generally recognized as having some of the most productive soils in Manitoba, especially suited to cereals, oilseeds and pulses. On average, canola is seeded on 1 million ha in the province.

The in-depth interviews with 15 farmers were conducted across western Canada between June and October 2002. The qualitative data collected during these interviews also helped in the development of a questionnaire and to ensure that its content and wording were appropriate. The 12-page questionnaire queried farmers on their experience and attitudes regarding HT canola. It assessed concerns regarding HT canola relative to other stresses that confront rural communities; the specific benefits and risks associated with the HT canola; and factors that contribute to risk perception among farmers, especially those that had experience in growing HT canola. The questionnaire used a 7-point rank order scale ranging from 1 for "strongly disagree",Ý to 7 for "strongly agree". Researchers associated with universities and industry as well as farmers reviewed the survey for comprehensiveness, technical accuracy and impartiality.

Within each of the two ecoregions, rural municipalities were equally divided into two classes of low or high abundance of volunteer canola, based on the 2001 Manitoba weed survey. The response rate was estimated to be 25 percent. The great majority (97 0ercent) were male, most (67 percent) were full-time farmers with an average of 28 years of farming experience. A large majority (85 percent) considered themselves knowledgeable about farming. The education background of 48 percent with postsecondary training was slightly higher than the Manitoba average (34 percent). The average farm size was 575 ha, again higher than the average Manitobe canola growers (409 ha). Minimum tillage was practiced by 51 percent of respondents, similar to the provincial average of 45.5 percent. The large majority (78 percent) grew HT canola, including RR (47 percent), LL (22 percent) CF (13 percent) and various combinations (15 percent), as reflected by the national data. For farmers growing HT canola, their attitude toward 10 benefits and 10 risk items were assessed.

Risk of HT compared to risk of other stresses for the rural community of farmers

Of the ten general risk items facing rural communities, input costs, cost of machinery and commodity prices top the list in that order, with high mean scores of 6.72, 6.67 and 6.60 respectively. Thus, farm economics were of paramount concern. This reflects the decline of net income of Canadian farmers over the last 20 years and farmers are now in the worst farm-income crisis in history. Environmental concerns that affected crop production, and hence income, were also ranked high; these included excessive moisture, drought, and natural disasters. HT crops ranked 9 out of the 10 general risks, but its score was still high at 5.08 (moderately risky). Its low ranking in comparison to other stresses explains why farmers took it up in the first place. These are farmers with big farms, averaging 575 ha, above the provincial, where ease of management is paramount, reducing input costs such as labour.

Risks versus benefits of HT canola

With regard to the benefits of HT canola, easier weed control, herbicide rotation and better weed control came top at scores of 5.47, 5.37 and 5.28 respectively. With regards to other purported benefits, 67 percent disagreed that HT crops were protecting "small farm heritage", and 58 percent disagreed that HT crops were "the answer to feeding the world's hungry"; while 39 percent rejected the notion that HT crops made "Canadian agriculture more competitive."

Loss of markets, restriction of farmers' rights in technology use contracts, and increased lawsuits were uppermost among the top risks at scores of 5.87, 5.56 and 5.36 respectively. One farmer interviewed said: "The loss of [European ] markets due to GMs had a huge financial impact. This was likely larger than cost of controlling volunteers or benefit of easy weed control."

Operational risks also scored high at 5.08, 5,07, 5.02 and 4.97 for HT volunteers, gene spread, herbicide resistant weeds, and RR crops causing problems in zero-tillage systems. One farmer in Saskachewan indicated how he was sued over patented HT canola that contaminated his land, creating biological and legal risks that had implications for all farmers. He said: "What it means to farmers all around the world is the loss and right to use your own seed... My rights as a farmer have been taken away because now I can no longer grow canola under fear of a lawsuit."

Farmers generally believed that it was not possible to control HT traits from spreading in the environment. Thus, most of respondents felt that "Terminator Technology" (75 percent), "segregation techniques " (67 percent) and "good farming practices (51 percent) would not solve HT trait contamination problems.

Major risk variables of HT canola: volunteers, years of growing, and farm size

The respondents could be segregated into three groups, those for whom the benefits were higher than risks, those for whom risks and benefits were equal, and those for whom risks were higher than benefits. The simplest model that best fits the data identified three main factors affecting perception of risks versus benefits: farm size, years of using HT, and volunteers. The data suggests that farmers perceived greater risk if they have smaller farms.

Linking the demise of small family farms with HT technology, one farmer stated; "GM technology will most certainly hasten the demise of family farms if it is allowed to progress unchecked. When we started farming... seed could be saved from one year to year... now, each year, a tremendous monetary outlay for seed must be made in order to grow canola because of the new GMO systems... more and more family farms will disappear ‚ simply because they are unable to shoulder these costs which will happen annually without relief."

Those farmers growing HT canola for more than a year perceived higher risks. A number of interviewed farmers similarly expressed concern that these risks increased over time. Risks were also perceived to be greatest for those who had volunteer canola on their land. Indeed, many indicated having problems with HT volunteers.

"These volunteers are showing up in fields that have never been planted to these crops. Farmers that have never seeded genetically modified crops are finding volunteers on their farm and that the volunteer picture is much broader than we had expected to see."

The three variables that contribute most to risk were in order of importance, HT volunteers, years of growing HT crops and farm size.Ý In total, 38 percent of HT farmers had experienced HT volunteer canola on their land. Of these 51 percent believed the source came from within their operations, 20 percent believed they came from outside, and 29 percent believed it came from both sources. Many respondents were concerned about the promiscuous and persistent nature of these volunteers, and that this would eventually compromise benefits currently associated with the technology.

"I had volunteer Roundup resistant canola in a sunflower field before I had ever used it, and, I could not remove it with Roundup [herbicide] or other means. We are finding resistant canola everywhere, even if it has never been seeded on that field. I like using Roundup as pre-emergent burn-off and it's not working great anymore."

Farmers who grew HT canola and had experienced HT volunteers believed that, on average, they were emerging in their field 2.5 years after planting these crops. Moreover HT volunteers were primarily Roundup Ready (72 percent) and emerged up to six years after have been planted. Multiple resistant volunteers were also prevalent (20 percent), followed by CFÝ (6 percent ) and LL (2 percent). Many methods have been used to control volunteers, including additional herbicides and tilling. Zero-till farmers actually reverted to tillage to control RR volunteers.

Monsanto is the only company that charges a $15/acre fee for HT canola. There is now a wider trend toward contract production that may increase seed costs and erode farmer rights to save, reuse and exchange seeds. Many of these contracts allow companies to investigate farmers, their land, and community for evidence of appropriation of proprietary seed technologies. This issue was addressed by the landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision, Monsanto v. Schmeiser, which essentially upheld industry's intellectual property claims over GM seeds and plants, making farmers liable for patent infringement, despite the likelihood that the seed they plant may have contaminated by GM traits.

A large majority (76 percent) of respondents who used HT canola anticipated that HT volunteers would become "more of a problem in the future", and 85 percent believed that industry had shifted the burden of responsibility for HT volunteers onto farmers. One respondent stated:

"Our biggest concern is Roundup Ready canola polluting our fields by being blown off neighbors fields and infesting our fields with voluntary plants. Is Monsanto going to compensate farmer in this situation?"Ý

The answer is yes. Schmeiser has just won an important victory over Monsanto in his lawsuit against the company for contaminating his land. In an out of court settlement, Monsanto has agreed to pay all the clean-up costs of HT canola with no gag-order. Schmeiser believes this precedent will ensure farmers are entitled to reimbursement when their field become contaminated [2]

References

1. Mauro IJ and McLachlan SM. Farmer knowledge and risk analysis: postrelease evalulation of herbicide-tolerant canola in Western Canada. Risk Analysis 2008, 28, DOI:10.1111/j.1539-6924.200801027.x

2. Schmeiser pleased with victory over Monsanto, Monsanto vs Schmeiser, http://www.percyschmeiser.com

USA: Researcher to Study Gene Flow 'Hot Spots' in Canola

Physorg.com, 24 April 2008.

A University of Arkansas researcher and her colleagues have won a joint grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency to look at the combined effects of global climate change on weed biology, focusing in particular on transgenic hybrid weeds created by cross-pollination with genetically modified crop plants. The joint award of $520,000 is one of only four in the country.

Cindy L. Sagers, professor of biological sciences in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues at the Environmental Protection Agency and Fresno State University will study gene flow from canola plants that have been genetically modified to be herbicide and pesticide resistant. Genetically modified canola, Brassica napus, has been approved as a crop in certain states on a limited basis since 1999, but interest in it has grown because of its potential use as a biofuel. In fact the first field trial in Arkansas for genetically modified canola took place this winter.

However, canola has a promiscuity problem.

"Canola will hybridize with about 40 species, and one of those is a particularly bad weed pest," Sagers said. Thus, the crop plant has the potential to create "superweeds" that spread and resist efforts to get rid of them.

While working at the EPA office in Corvallis, Ore., Sagers learned how to hand-pollinate canola and its cousin mustards so that the researchers can study hybrids in a laboratory setting. The researchers also began examining the problem from a geospatial context, contacting extension agents in the northern Midwest, consulting online flora and herbaria, mining plant databases and funneling all of that information into a map of the distribution of weeds that are sexually compatible with canola.

"I learned the value of a multidisciplinary approach to solving a well-defined problem," Sagers said. "There were geographers, geneticists and ecologists working on the same project." This research laid the ground work for the currently funded project.

For the USDA/EPA project, Sagers and her colleagues are working with the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies to create more detailed distribution maps of canola and its sexually compatible relatives, focusing in particular on field mustard Brassica rapa, which grows in every state in the nation except Alaska.

In 2009 and 2010, they will be able to track the gene flow and gene flow rates of genetic modifications. They seek patterns in population biology that might make the plants more or less likely to hybridize and create "super weeds."

"We're asking, 'what is the influence of domesticated fields on native plants?'" Sagers said.

With the distribution maps, they will be able to build predictive models that will show what could happen with global climate change. They will be able to show how temperature changes might affect flowering and cross-pollination with related plants and weeds.

Source: University of Arkansas

USA: Scientists call for more access to biotech crop data
Biologists call for making available more detailed maps of the locations of biotech crops. Access to maps of biotech crops on a county and township level will give researchers greater ability to analyze the effects of biotech crops on wildlife, water quality, and on pest and beneficial insects.

Physorg.com, 24 April 2008.

Picture caption: This map shows the 2005 distribution of agricultural fields of any crop in Arizona counties (delimited with thick lines) and townships (delimited with thin lines). The townships average 85.2 square kilometers (32.9 square miles) in size. For the 261 townships with at least one agricultural field, the average number of fields per township was 96. Twenty-five of those townships had between one and five fields (green); the other 236 townships had between six and 356 fields (blue). Most land grants (pink) and Indian lands (yellow) are not divided into townships. Mapping the distribution of genetically engineered crops by county, or in many cases by townships with more than five fields, would preserve farmers' privacy. Mapped data are from the Arizona Geographic Information Council and the Arizona Cotton Research and Protection Council. Credit: Cartography by C. Ellers-Kirk, The University of Arizona, 2008.

"Since 1996 more than a billion acres have been planted with biotech crops in the U.S.," said Michelle Marvier of Santa Clara University in Calif. "We don't really know what are the pros and cons of this important new agricultural technology."

"People on both sides of the debate about genetically engineered crops have been making a lot of claims," said Marvier, an associate professor of biology and environmental studies. "One side has been saying that biotech crops reduce insecticide use, reduce tillage and therefore the erosion of top soil. People on the other side say that biotech crops could hurt native species."

The scientists' call will be published as a Policy Forum in the April 25, 2008, issue of the journal Science. Marvier's co-authors are Yves Carrière and Bruce Tabashnik of The University of Arizona in Tucson; Norman Ellstrand of the University of California at Riverside; Paul Gepts of the University of California at Davis; Peter Kareiva of Santa Clara University and The Nature Conservancy; Emma Rosi-Marshall of Loyola University in Chicago; and L. LaReesa Wolfenbarger of the University of Nebraska in Omaha.

The article, Harvesting Data from Genetically Engineered Crops, has a map showing the distribution of crop fields in Arizona township by township.

Tabashnik, UA head and professor of entomology, said, "Putting Arizona's biotech cotton on the map has allowed us to be a leader in assessing the environmental impacts of biotech crops."

In Arizona, a unique collaboration between researchers and farmers has made detailed crop data available to researchers at The University of Arizona.

Tabashnik said, "It's a win-win situation. We analyze data they collect, so they can control pests better and make more money. It helps us obtain fundamental information about what's going on in the field that we could never get without them."

One of the UA's analyses showed that adoption of biotech cotton in Arizona helped to reduce insecticide use while sustaining yields.

Carrière, a UA professor of entomology who has done many of the analyses, said, "You have to protect the privacy of the farmers. We've done it in Arizona, so why not do it across the country?"

To start examining those questions in other parts of the U.S., the team of scientists call for the government to make available data it is already collecting.

At the present time, the team writes, the U.S. Department of Agriculture collects data at the scale of individual farms, but the data are only available to researchers at the scale of entire states. Answering key questions about the environmental impacts of genetically engineered crops requires finer spatial resolution.

"The analyses could be about quality of water, quality of soil, non-target effects, regional population density of pests and economic aspects such as yield improvement," said Carrière. "The findings could be useful to a wide range of people."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistical Service annually collects data documenting acreage planted to various crops in all 50 states, the researchers write in their paper. In addition, the NASS annually interviews more than 125,000 farmers about their land use and the acreage planted in various biotech crops.

Tabashnik said, "We're already spending the money to have these data collected. Let's make them available in the right format for researchers to use. It would be a relatively inexpensive additional step with enormous scientific and public benefit."

Will We All Soon Eat Lab-Grown Meat?

Yahoo! News, 24 April 2008. By Ben Harder.

The animals rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced this week that it will offer a $1 million reward to the inventor of laboratory-grown, tastes-just-like-chicken (or beef or pork), no-animals-were-harmed-in-the-making-of-this-burger meat -- should someone come along who can claim that mantle. The Associated Press quickly gobbled up the news, and Time offered its take yesterday. PETA lays out its rationale as follows: "More than 40 billion chickens, fish, pigs, and cows are killed every year for food in the United States in horrific ways. Chickens are drugged to grow so large they often become crippled, mother pigs are confined to metal cages so small they can't move, and fish are hacked apart while still conscious--all to feed America's meat addiction. In vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering. In addition, in vitro meat would dramatically reduce the devastating effects the meat industry has on the environment."

The environmental argument holds considerable weight. Large quantities of water, grain, antibiotics, and energy are used to produce hamburgers, and animal waste is a pungent and dangerous problem of its own. If meat could be grown efficiently in vitro, the benefits to society could be many. But not everyone is fully on board: Calling yesterday for a "measured approach," the New York Times editorial board opined that it "will be a barren world if the herds and flocks disappear in favor of meat grown in a laboratory tank." In the long run, I wonder if our omnivorous species has any choice.

I also wonder if mass-produced, lab-grown produce might be next. Hydroponics and greenhouse gardens are hardly new, of course. But imagine a world in which crops are grown in carefully controlled indoor settings, where droughts and deluges could be managed, runoff water could be captured and reused, and herbicides and pesticides--and therefore controversial GMO crops that have had pesticide-making genes sutured into their DNA--would be unneeded. Already, some scientists are predicting the rise of high-rise farms.

Will a farm-in-a-skyscraper soon sprout over every urban supermarket? More generally, what and how will we eat in the future? As a science editor at U.S.News & World Report, I'd be very interested in any story (science writers, I'm talking to you) exploring the prospect that our descendants might subsist largely on lab-grown foods.

With a global food crisis brewing, the topic has perhaps never been more timely. Growing meat and crops in the lab might also lead to indirect environmental benefits, like staving off the ongoing destruction of the Amazon. "The meat-substitute niche is currently occupied largely by soy," the Times editorialists noted. Soy may be free of animal cruelty concerns, but it's not an environmentalist's dream. Each year, Brazilian soybean farmers burn down vast tracts of Amazonian rain forest in order to plant their cash crop, which occasionally lands on my plate and, I suspect, feeds many members of PETA.

I welcome all ideas and perspectives.

Philippines: GM foods opposition gains strength International health group calls for banning GM crops, agri liberalization

Balita Pinoy, 24 April 2008.

DAVAO CITY -- An international environmental health organization has joined calls for government leaders all over the world to stop liberalization in agriculture and the of use genetically-modified crops to avert the looming food crisis as predicted by the United Nation (UN).

The Pesticide Action Network (PAN), which also operates in the Philippines, made the statement after the UN issued a warning on possible riots if the food prices continue to rise.

Fifty-five world government leaders had recently met and agreed in Johannesburg, South Africa to release a report of the first UN-organized International Assessment of Agriculture Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), discussed the problems and strategies to overcome world hunger.

In a statement, Filipino toxicologist Dr. Romeo Quijano, president of PAN Philippines and an IAASTD Bureau member, said, "the green revolution of the past, with all its expensive and toxic products, has left a trail of destruction. The IAASTD essentially says its time to clean that up and move on."

"The IAASTD report, which has more than 400 authors headed by Nobel laureate and scientist Robert Watson, is an unprecedented attempt to bring together multiple stakeholders from government, agro-chemical companies, scientists, health and environment advocates in the hope of making a blueprint for sustainable agriculture for the next 50 years," the statement said.

Watson and his team documented the inequitable distribution of costs and benefits of the present farming sector, including the undue influence of trans-national agribusiness, the growing impacts of environmental crises and the unfair global trade policies that result in over half of the world's population not having enough to eat.

"The most widespread forms of industrial agriculture have degraded the natural resource base on which human survival depends, and contribute daily to worsening water and climate crises," the team noted.

Lead author Marcia Ishii Eiteman of PAN North America said what happened now in agricultural sector is a "wake-up call for governments and international agencies. The survival of the planet's food systems demands global action to support agro-ecological farming and fair and equitable trade."

Kevin Akoyi of PAN Uganda supported the findings and said "we can produce more and better food without destroying rural livelihoods and our natural resources."

The report called on government leaders to develop small-scale farmers and agro-ecological methods to avert the food crisis.

Dr. Quijano said that during their meeting, they had agreed "in principle" that genetically-modified crops are not the solution of the spiraling food prices and hunger.

"People of every nation have the right to determine their best food and agricultural policies," he added.

Dr. Prabha Mahale, an IAASTD member from India and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, emphasized that "the scientific evidence gives unequivocal support to organic agriculture which is seen as a credible solution and a sustainable production method for the 21st century."

The report also criticized the move of government leaders who allowed the opening of national markets to international competition which can lead to long-term negative effects on poverty alleviation, food security and the environment.

However, countries like Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have yet to sign the report considering that it was against on export-oriented and import-dependent agriculture.

"Just as climate change is an Îinconvenient truth', only the world's agro-chemical companies will find our recommendations inconvenient," Quijano said.

Quijano said while civil society groups like himself may not fully agree with some of the conclusions, they unanimously respect the fact that this report reflects the current consensus among participants.

"It is high time that the Philippines and the rest of the global community must now launch the revolution in agricultural policies and practices that is urgently needed to attain more equitable and sustainable food and farming systems direly needed for the future," he said.

BASF Quarterly Profit Rises 13% on Oil, Crop Units

Bloomberg.com, 24 April 2008. By Sheenagh Matthews.

BASF SE, the world's biggest chemical producer, said first-quarter profit rose 13 percent on increasing revenue from oil-and-gas production and demand for crop-protection gained.

Net income gained to 1.17 billion euros ($1.85 billion) from 1.04 billion euros a year earlier, the Ludwigshafen, Germany- based company said today in a statement. Sales advanced 8.8 percent to 15.92 billion euros. Results beat analysts predictions for profit of 1.14 billion euros on sales of 15.3 billion euros.

Rest of article: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=ag0jhEfBVGYM&refer=germany

Rainforest Action Network Joins International Protest Against Industry-Led "Responsible Soy" Roundtable

Rainforest Action Network press release, 24 April 2008.

BUENOS AIRES ‚ Representatives from several campesino, social justice and environmental groups, including Rainforest Action Network (RAN), protested the annual meeting of the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) today. Twenty people attempted to enter the meeting, but were forced to remain in the building lobby. They were there to denounce the Roundtable's exclusive membership of major industry playersóincluding U.S. agribusiness giants ADM, Bunge and Cargillóand large international NGOs and its systematic exclusion of campesino and Indigenous voices. The protestors contend that the Roundtable fails to address the unsustainability of industrial soy productionówhich is expanding dramatically in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguayóand its effects on campesino and Indigenous communities.

Today's protest underscores an open call issued last week by 156 groups demanding that the large NGOs currently participating in the RTRS resign. A statement by Friends of the Earth International declared that the Roundtable "frustrates real solutions." The RTRS does not regulate the use of genetically engineered soy or chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides. Nor does it address the contentious land-use problems fostered by soy production. Industrial soy production prompts land-clearing in globally significant ecosystems such as the Amazon and the adjacent Cerradoówhere it has become a leading cause of deforestationóand has led to the violent eviction of small farmers and Indigenous communities from their traditional lands.

"I've visited so-called 'responsible' soy plantations," said Andrea Samulon of Rainforest Action Network. "The plantations still dump dangerous agrotoxins into the soil and water, and they still stand on land that was once healthy forest. They still displace communities and leave people with little to eat. The RTRS has simply failed to end the environmental and human rights abuses perpetrated by soy producers, including U.S. corporations ADM, Bunge and Cargill."

"We wanted to participate in this event to show that the idea of responsible soy isn't viable for small rural farmers," said Delio Giménez of Association of Farmers of Alto Paran· (ASAGRAPA), Paraguay. "The development model of agribusiness is not compatible with small farmer production. 'Responsible soy' will be responsible for much more misery in Latin America."

"Now is the time to defend the land and food sovereignty of our people," said Pedro Pablo Caballero, a representative of the Oñondivepa community in the department of San Pedro. Deforestation is happening at an alarming rate in our country, and if we continue at this pace, five years from now, our forests in Paraguay will be gone and the impacts on the environment will be severe."

Rainforest Action Network is pushing U.S. agribusiness giants ADM, Bunge and Cargill to stop clearing forests and evicting Indigenous and local communities to accommodate their international soy and palm oil operations. The companies fund 60 percent of soy production in Brazil and have major operations in Paraguay and Argentina as well.

For more information on the NGO declaration against the RTRS go to http://www.lasojamata.org.

UK: 90% imported meat fed on GM

Farmers Guardian, 24 April 2008.

NINETY per cent of the meat imported into the EU has been fed on GM feed varieties, many of which are not even approved in the EU.

At a time when feed prices are crippling the British livestock sector, MEP Neil Parish has urged the Commission to ditch its hypocritical stance and allow cheaper feed into Europe.

EU figures show the current price differential between GMO and non-GMO feed to be around £50 per ton. "It is a great irony that we import poultry, pig and beef meet from outside the EU from animals fed on products we deny our own farmers.

"This helps no-one, consumers have no idea whether their meat has been fed on GM and farmers have to pay through the nose for feed," said Mr Parish, chairman of the European Parliament agriculture committee.

In a parliamentary question delivered this week, Mr Parish asked the Commission to review its GM zero-tolerance stance on imported feed.

"I am not suggesting a free for all on GM, but we must ensure that any threshold is fair and achievable for non GM feed. With new varieties of GM soya being planted around the world, it will be virtually impossible to guarantee that any shipment into the EU is truly GM-free.

"I doubt anyone will bother sending GM-free shipments to the EU as a result and this will make non-GM feed even scarcer and more expensive for our farmers," said Mr Parish.

He also urged the Commission to speed up its GM approvals process which lags years behind the rest of the world putting UK farmers at a huge competitive disadvantage.

Philippines: diocese will rice provided by US donation

Catholic World News, 24 April 2008.

Manila - A Catholic diocese in the Philippines has announced that it will not distribute rice provided by US donors, because of fears that the food aid might include genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

"We not accept any US rice allocation because they may contain GMOs that could pose some possible health hazards later on," announced Bishop Dinualdo Gutierrez of the Marbel diocese in Mindanao province.

The use of GMOs is illegal in the Philippines. The Marbel diocese was reacting to a report, circulated by the environmental-activist group Greenpeace, that rice supplied by US donors as part of an international aid program could include GMOs.

EU commission investigates link between biofuels and food crisis

EU Observer, 24 April 2008. By Leigh Phillips

In the wake of mounting pressure from international organisations such as the World Bank and the United Nations World Food Programme, European Commission President Barroso has requested a study on whether there is any relationship between the recent skyrocketing of food prices around the world and biofuels.

"I have personally asked for a study on all aspects: the impacts on prices, the impact on agriculture, the impact on development, etc. All the aspects," said the president.

He made the comments following a meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme last Wednesday (17 April) but until now they had only been reported by the Belgian press.

"We must have the courage to re-examine our [biofuels] objectives," said Mr Leterme on the margins of the meeting with the commission president.

A spokesperson for the president confirmed on Thursday (24 April) that a study had been requested but said this is only to supply him with data on the relationship so he can form an opinion on the recent concerns about a link.

"The president is not however considering changing the ten percent biofuels target," said Mark Gray, a commission spokesperson.

"It is simply for the president to look at the data on a possible link with food prices."

Mr Gray refused to be drawn on whether the commission would publish the data gathered.

"We haven't ruled it in or out whether it could be published. It's for him to decide."

EU leaders last spring agreed that the EU should increase the use of biofuels in transport fuel to ten percent by 2020, up from a planned 5.75 percent target to be achieved by 2010.

Commission divided over biofuels target

The move comes amid speculation that there is a growing division within the commission over the question.

Last week, the commission's development chief, Louis Michel, speaking to the Belgian Senate, said that biofuels were a "catastrophe".

"I have long said that the fashion for biofuels could be a catastrophe especially in countries which are not self-sufficient in food," reported the Belga news agency.

Furthermore, last weekend, the UK's Guardian newspaper quoted a commission official saying: "The target is now secondary."

However, the following Monday, energy spokesperson Ferran Tarradellas denied that there was any reconsideration of the target.

On Tuesday (22 April), the Reuters news agency reported that during the commission's internal discussion on sustainability criteria for biofuels, environment commissioner Stavros Dimas and development chief Louis Michel had been on the one side, arguing for social criteria such as the link with food prices to be considered, but were shot down by energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs and trade commissioner Peter Mandelson.

And Thursday (24 April), agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel argued that biofuels cannot be the reason for rising food prices. Speaking at a hearing in Copenhagen, she said of the 2.1 billion tonnes of grain produced worldwide, only 0.1 billion tonnes are used for biofuels, Danish daily Politiken reported.

"This could not tilt the prices," she said.

However, Mr Gray categorically denied that there was any division. "There is unanimity on the subject and we have underscored that we are looking at second and third generation biofuel alternatives and that we are developing sustainability criteria for the rest."

A spokesperson for Mr Mandelson said: "The commissioner certainly raised the issue of food security and that it would have to be watched in any biofuels scenario."

"It wasn't as clear-cut as some articles in the media would make it out to be."

"The problem with social criteria is that you have to be very careful with WTO compatibility," he added.

USA: Keep Your non-GMO Corn Pure

AgWeb.com, 24 April 2008. By Sara Muri.

Which way the wind blows is an important factor for producers raising corn without genetic modification, specialty corn or hybrid corn seed. Without proper management, these types of corn could be contaminated with genetically modified corn, commonly called GMO corn. Ý

"Nationwide the majority of the corn grown is GMO," says Peter Thomison, corn agronomist at Ohio State University. "If a farmer is growing regular non-traited corn, their neighbors are likely growing a traited corn," Ý

It is this situation that causes producers to take extensive measures to manage pollen drift for non-GMO corn. Ý

The drifting dangers

Corn is an open-pollinated crop, easily cross-pollinated by wind and gravity. Thomison says some pollen, usually small amounts, can easily drift from one field to another, causing the non-GMO corn to become contaminated. Ý

Farmers who produce non-genetically modified corn often receive premiums for their product, mostly from overseas markets, Thomison says. Countries such as Japan have zero tolerance for unapproved GMO commodities. Comparably, the European Union requires that all grain containing more than 0.9% genetically altered material be labeled as genetically engineered. Ý

Ways to prevent contamination

To prevent contamination from GMO-corn, Thomison offers the following guidelines.

•

Distance: One of the most effective methods to prevent pollen contamination is by isolating or increasing the distance between fields of different corn types, he says. "The potential for crosspollination decreases as the distance between GMO and non-GMO corn fields increases."

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Buffer strips/Borders: If fields can't have a large distance between them, Thomison suggests using buffer strips or border rows. Depending on the size of the field, a certain number of feet or border rows will isolate the non-GMO corn, he says. Thomison also says natural borders such as country roads, woods or water bodies are also a good solution.

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Alter planting times: Thomison says it may be difficult, but finding out when and what your neighbors are planting can aid with pollen-drift management. He says that having your corn reach maturity at a different time from your neighbor's will reduce the chance of crosspollination.

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Keep equipment clean: Thomison says completely cleaning out equipment between fields and harvests can also reduce mixing GMO and non-GMO corn. "You should make certain kernels aren't left over from previous crops," he says. "Clean out your planters and combines."

For More Information

Click here to read Thomison's article, "Managing 'Pollen Drift' to Minimize Contamination of Non-GMO Corn" http://ohioline.osu.edu/agf-fact/0153.html Click here to read Mike Gray's article,Ý"Pollen Drift and Refuge-Management Considerations for Transgenic Hybrids," http://www.ipm.uiuc.edu/bulletin/pastpest/articles/200304e.html a University of Illinois Extension publication. Ý

The Global Pesticide Pushers in Latin America

North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), 24 April 2008. By Jimmy Langman.

Multinational pesticide corporations headquartered in the Global North are expanding their sales of some of the most dangerous chemicals in Latin America-chemicals known to cause a plethora of health problems, including cancers and birth defects. This is happening even as U.S. and E.U. laws have banned or severely restricted many of the pesticides and UN conventions have come into force. A NACLA investigation supported by the Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Fund finds that the pesticide industry has made this possible through a handful of strategies, including offshore production, using local distributors, and selling production licenses to smaller companies.

IN SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA, A BOOMING LOWLAND city near cattle ranches and thriving soy fields, I visit Campo Verde, a small, unassuming shop catering to small farmers at the Abasto Market. I scan the shelves and find at least a dozen of the world's most toxic chemicals. One liter of Thodorn 600, or methamidophos, produced by Todo Agricola S.A., a Peru-based manufacturer, costs less than $10. The insecticide is banned in the United States and the European Union, as is monocrotophos, also an insecticide, going for $10 and change.

"The strongest are the most toxic," says the shopkeeper, 21-year- old Alberto Lopez. "They are more effective, and also cheap." He tells me he has no formal training or much experience with the chemicals. Places like Campo Verde, where small farmers with little or no pesticides training can buy the most hazardous chemicals with ease, are widespread in Latin America. Large, medium, and small companies from industrial countries sell pesticides through local distributors, like the monocrotophos, which is manufactured in China but packaged and sold by a Bolivian company. Homegrown Latin American manufacturers also produce and sell generic versions, which are known to cause a number of serious ailments, from cancers to birth defects.

Although the United States and European Union have banned and imposed strict regulations on a long list of pesticides, they permit multinational agrochemical companies with U.S. and E.U. headquarters to sell those very chemicals in developing countries to both big corporate plantations and small farmers-which then export back pesticide-laced fruits and vegetables. In one exhaustive study of U.S. Customs records, the Los Angeles-based Foundation for Advancements in Science and Education found that between 2001 and 2003, 1.7 billion pounds of pesticide products were exported from U.S. ports; almost 28 million pounds of them were either banned, severely restricted, or unregistered in the United States.

The numbers sound alarming, but they represent a significant improvement over the foundation's findings in past years. This does not mean, however, that U.S. pesticide manufacturers are becoming conscientious-instead, like multinationals in other industries, they are shifting their production offshore to cut costs and, in part, to avoid stricter environmental scrutiny at home. By moving production offshore and using local intermediaries, the agrochemical companies are expanding their business, with global sales surpassing $35 billion in 2006 and increasing faster in the past few years than they have in decades. Meanwhile, the pesticide industry has consolidated during the past two decades through mergers and acquisitions into six major companies-call them the Big Six-that control about 80% of the market (see chart, opposite page).

These powerful corporations, with revenues often surpassing the income of the nations where they do business, are increasingly setting their sights on Latin America. In 2004, pesticide sales in the region grew by 25% over the previous year, the largest such increase in more than a decade, reaching more than $5.4 billion. One estimate puts Latin American sales at $7.5 billion by 2009. This rapid growth in Latin America's pesticide market is driven by expanding crop areas, new disease outbreaks, and an increase in plantings of genetically modified (GM) crops. Agrochemical companies are actively entering the GM crop industry, which is growing by about 8% a year, with Latin America the largest customer of GM seeds after North America. This complements their pesticide business. Monsanto is far and away the GM industry leader, with a 90% market share. Soy, corn, cotton, rice, wheat, and other crops are increasingly of the GM variety, and are in many instances highly pesticide dependent. GM soy, for example, requires extensive use of the herbicide glyphosate, also known as Roundup, a chemical that has generated large-scale health complaints and cancer suspicions throughout popular soy-growing areas in Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia.

Offshore production is another tactic. Bayer, Syngenta, and BASF- the top three multinationals that control more than two thirds of the Latin American pesticide market-all have production facilities around the world, including in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. In other cases, however, companies have sold rights to the chemicals to smaller companies. Take the Los Angeles-based Amvac Chemical Corporation. In a Los Angeles Times expose published in April, the investigative journalist T. Christian Miller found that the company essentially specializes in buying up the rights to produce dangerous chemicals discontinued by their original manufacturers. One of the most striking examples is the insecticide mevinphos, which Amvac bought from DuPont in 1989 and now sells to Mexico and other countries, despite that the Environmental Protection Agency' banned the chemical in 1994, after it became the leading cause of poisoning among California's agricultural laborers.

But Amvac's most insidious product has been dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, the active ingredient in Nemagon, an extremely toxic soil fumigant. Dow Chemical and Shell Oil stopped producing the chemical in 1977, when the Environmental Protection Agency suspended it after finding it could cause sterility in workers. Amvac began producing it and found a buyer in Dole Fruit, which had been using it on its Central American banana plantations since the late 1960s. It was finally banned in the United States in 1985.

Today, Dole, Amvac, Dow, and Shell are facing lawsuits from many thousands of banana plantation workers in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. The workers claim the chemical caused widespread sterility and other health problems, ranging from miscarriages and birth defects to liver damage and cancer. In one of the lawsuits, filed on behalf of nearly 5,000 banana workers, lawyers argue that during the spraying of DBPC on banana trees, the chemical fell on workers and entered their water supply. They charge that Dole did little to protect them by, for example, giving them gloves, safety goggles, or masks. The lawsuit argues, moreover, that Dow and Amvac knew about DBCP's role in causing sterility, which has been public knowledge since the late 1950s, but the companies "continued to market, sell, and use pesticide products containing DBCP outside of the United States."

In 2002, a bold judge in Nicaragua made a historic ruling when he demanded that the companies pay $490 million in compensation to 583 banana workers injured by DBCP In July, five lawsuits over the use of DBCP on Central American banana plantations began hearings in a U.S. court. And in November, the first of these cases resulted in a jury award of $3.3 million to six Nicaraguans.

Despite several scientific studies that back the workers' case, the companies continue to deny that their use of DBCP is at fault in the workers health problems. In court papers, Glenn Wintemute, an owner of Amvac, said the company issued safety recommendations to Dole and that it continued to sell the chemical because "it was a product that was profitable."

THE ISSUE IS NOT NEW. IN 1979, journalists from the Center for Investigative Reporting published an article in Mother Jones that later became the landmark book Circle of Poison. Their work sparked an outcry in the media and in the halls of governments. Still, more than 25 years later, the vicious circle remains. Environmental groups like the Pesticide Action Network (PAN)-formed after the publication of Circle of Poison, and today composed of groups and individuals in more than 90 countries-have wasted little time moving to tackle the issue from a variety of fronts. Their constant and vociferous pressure has helped lead to two significant UN conventions aimed at curbing the sale and use of the most hazardous pesticides.

The first, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, signed in 2001 and since then ratified by 150 countries, calls for the elimination of 12 highly toxic chemicals that remain in the natural environment for long periods, can be easily transported across the globe, and accumulate in the body fat of humans and animals. Nine of the 12 chemicals banned by the Stockholm Convention are pesticides and were formerly part of the so-called "dirty dozen" that environmental groups have campaigned to ban since the 1980s. Ten other chemicals are being reviewed for possible inclusion to the Stockholm banned list. The second UN treaty, known as the Rotterdam Convention, implemented in 2004 and ratified by 119 nations, requires that countries importing any of 39 listed chemicals (29 of which are pesticides) be informed of any bans or severe restrictions on them in the exporting country. Jay Vroom, president of CropLife America, the trade association for pesticide companies in the United States, says the term ban belongs to "political jargon."

"If you look at our laws and regulations in the U.S., there is no such regulatory process as banning a pesticide chemical," Vroom says, arguing that some pesticides have simply had their registrations canceled. "This is the exact legal term for what many people would say is a banned chemical."

He adds: "Simply because a product is not registered for use in one country does not mean it is banned. That is a very crude term. There are a lot of good, rational drivers on why a product may not be registered in a country where it is produced but perfectly legitimate and safe to use in another country with different kinds of crop pest infestations and climate conditions."

Erika Rosenthal, a lawyer with the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law and an expert on pesticides in Latin America, sees a duplicitous tactic behind this argument over terminology. "Instead of allowing their products to go through the registration cancellation process-commonly known as having their products banned for use in the U.S.-many companies will voluntarily withdraw or cancel the pesticide's registration in an effort to avoid bad publicity," she says. In other cases, the companies withdraw some chemical ingredients from the market because governments are requiring them to seek new approval for certain pesticides through a costly re-registration process. According to Barbara Dinham, a longtime activist with PAN, about a third of the pesticide industry's research dollars are being spent on supporting re-registration in the European Union. In the United States, according to Rosenthal, some of the pesticides that companies export are never registered to begin with.

More than 70,000 different chemicals are available on the market today The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that 1,500 new ones are introduced each year-an astounding regulatory challenge for governments. Rosenthal points out that most developing countries do not have the ability to monitor the application of "restricted use" pesticides in the field. Unlike in the United States, where many restricted-use pesticides must be applied from within a ventilated cab, or only by licensed personnel, in the South these products are routinely applied in the field by workers with no training, no protective equipment, and little or no ability to even understand warning labels.

Rosenthal says the EPA's pesticide export policy is downright naive. "The U.S. pesticide export policy assumes that the importing government is the best suited to make pesticide import decisions. But the problem with this convenient justification is that agricultural companies have enormous influence in these countries- in some countries there is a rotating door between the head of the national CropLife group and the ministry of agriculture. Many governments in developing countries lack the professional staff, analytic capacity, and regulatory infrastructure necessary to even evaluate pesticide risks. This is no secret; developing country governments have made it clear in their national implementation plans for the Stockholm Convention, for example. In some countries, the registration process is not more than an administrative rubber stamp."

But the Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions pertain only to a few of the chemicals used in agriculture. And although the FAO revised its International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides in 2002-urging that the most dangerous pesticides, including those on the World Health Organization (WHO) list of hazardous chemicals, not be used in developing countries unless control measures "can ensure that the product can be used with acceptable risk to the user"-the code is strictly voluntary.

Most everyone I speak to agrees that the UN conventions are important contributions to curtailing the trade in the most hazardous pesticides. But many pesticide experts in Latin American countries say that, in their current incarnations, these UN treaties do not address the main pesticide problems facing the region. Desiree Elizondo, former director of the Nicaragua environmental ministry and a consultant on regional pesticide issues, says few of the chemicals that are actually used in Latin America are named by the conventions. "We need a much more radical change at the international level," she says.

The Latin American Pesticide Action Network (Red de Accion en Plaguicidas y Sus Alternativas para America Latina, or RAP-AL), a regionwide network of groups, has been pressing for just such a change: the complete ban on the use of all pesticides found on the World Health Organizations list of extremely hazardous (1A) and hazardous (1B) chemicals, the vast majority of which are not mentioned in the UN conventions. Elsa Nivia, an agronomist from Colombia and coordinator of RAP-AL, says those chemicals are a disproportionate cause of deaths and poisonings in the region. "The present ecological, social and cultural conditions of the region make it impossible to have safe or appropriate management of such pesticides," she says.

"Progress has been slow," concedes Gero Vaagt, head of the FAO's pesticide management program, who agrees that the present UN treaties don't go far enough.

Vroom of CropLife, on the contrary, says the treaties have been a success. "We think that there has been a lot of progress in the implementation of these international conventions," Vroom says, "and a lot of capacity building around the world in almost any country that needs to be a sovereign entity with regard to the regulation of these complex products."

Beyond the strengths and weaknesses of the existing multilateral agreements in controlling hazardous pesticides, the international trade systern-from the WTO to regional and bilateral trade deals-is also undermining national pesticide laws and weakening the ability of Latin American governments to restrict dangerous chemicals. This is especially so in the case of the WTO's demand for "harmonization," also referred to as "concurrence" and "equivalence," which means setting minimum common standards for pesticides and food between countries.

For example, if a country wants to enact a stricter standard on pesticides than the WTOs, it could face the risk of being challenged as a "technical barrier to trade" and receiving millions of dollars in trade sanctions. Using the investor rights provisions in Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a U.S. pesticide maker, the Chemtura Corporation (formerly the Crompton Corporation), has sued Canada for $100 million stating that country's ban of the chemical lindane on canola crops was tantamount to an expropriation of its investment. Even though lindane is also banned in the United States, the company argues that there was no "conclusive scientific evidence" to support such a ban. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and several bilateral trade deals are largely patterned on NAFTA and include similar investor rights clauses.

According to Fernando Bejarano, coordinator of the Mexico group Pesticide and Alternatives Network, the downward harmonization imposed by the WTO on standards has already been at work in Central America, where several pesticides that are classified by the WHO as "extremely or very dangerous" have been downgraded to "dangerous" or "slightly toxic." In the Central American Common Market, the labels on some formulations of paraquat, which has been banned or severely restricted in a host of European countries, has been downgraded to a blue or "slightly toxic" label.

The WTOs binding, global standards on the acceptable pesticide residues in food are decided by the UN Codex Alimentarius Commission. The Rome-based commission's workings and decisions are dominated by food and chemical industry lobbyists, says Mary Bottari, director of the Harmonization Project for Public Citizen, who has attended some of the Codex meetings held in the United States. "When the U.S. officials go abroad to these Codex meetings, they typically bring with them a lobbying team of 10 or 15 industry representatives to decide what the global rule is going to be on the various pesticides," she says. "You basically have U.S. agency officials in these harmonization bodies agreeing to rules that are weaker than those of the U.S. What is happening is a race to the bottom in regulatory standards."

IN BOLIVIA, I TALK TO GUIDO CONdarco of Plagbol, an independent group that advises the Bolivian government on pesticide issues. He says the group found that four of the 14 pesticides that are officially banned in Bolivia-Aldrin, DDT, Folidol and Endrin- continue to be sold in the country. Bolivia has the highest rate of growth in pesticide imports in the region, more than doubling its imports over the past five years, 30% of which is contraband.

"The farmers do not understand the risks involved [with these chemicals], nor even that they are prohibited," Condarco says. "There is also little control by authorities."

It's an all too common story throughout Latin America. Pesticide use is increasing each year in the region, which is scrambling to boost its agricultural exports in a globalized economy.

But the millions of farm workers across the region are still largely untrained and ill-prepared to handle the chemicals safely, and government regulations, where they exist, are usually unenforced. That, says health researchers, is also leading to an increased chance of birth defects and developmental problems among the children of farm workers as well as an increased likelihood of skin disease, miscarriages, sterility, and cancer among workers. According to the FAO, while developing countries worldwide use only about 20% of the pesticides used each year, its farm workers suffer 99% of pesticide poisonings. This amounts to about 70,000 yearly poisoning cases, which can lead to death and a far greater number of serious, long-term illnesses, according to the International Labor Organization. Take Eugenia Mejias, one of Chiles thousands of temporeros, the seasonal farm workers who help Chilean exporters get their crops to port from October to February each year. Mejias never thought working on a farmnear the medium-sized agricultural city Rancagua, located in the Central Valley, Chile's principal fruit- growing region where most of the pesticides in the country are used- would result in a mothers nightmare. But in 1989, her daughter Evelyn was born with congenital malformations, or birth defects. Confined to a wheel chair for life, the child grew at an infinitesimalIy slow pace; before she died at age 14 in 2003, her body was the size of a three-year-olds. Her back was twisted with her spine exposed, her legs were paralyzed and crooked, and a small device had to be implanted in her skull to continually rid her brain of excess water.

During her pregnancy, Mejias lived just yards away from an apple orchard regularly fumigated by planes. No appropriate precautions were taken to protect nearby workers and residents. Mejias and her family say they remember smelling and breathing the chemicals in their home and enduring headaches, stomachaches, diarrhea, and vomiting. Evelyn became a national symbol in Chile, representing that country's many children born with malformations stemming from the misuse of hazardous pesticides. "We want to speak out because this must stop," Mejias says.

Evelyns tale continues to be repeated many times over, says Alicia Munoz, secretary-general of the Chilean group National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women. Munoz says agricultural businesses in Chile are mostly careless when it comes to the health of their workers. "They are not informing their people, for example, telling them when they can safely return to the fields after aerial spraying."

In 1999 the Hospital of Rancagua produced a study that found an unusually high incidence of miscarriage and babies born with defects in the Central Valley. The study used statistical models showing that because of pesticide use, the chances of children being born with birth defects is 40% greater for people living in the region than elsewhere in Chile. Other studies in the country have racked up similar results. Manolis Kogevinas, an expert on occupational epidemiology based in Barcelona, says of the Rancagua study, "It would be reasonable to find such effects, because we have enough experimental data to support such a hypothesis." Constanza Cerda, a Chilean grandmother, founded a group in 2001, after jumping through bureaucratic hoop after hoop in the country's public health care system for the sake of her grandson Rodrigo, now six years old, who suffers from a plethora of birth defects. The group, called Help Rodrigo, includes 34 women from her town, Melipilla, who all have children suffering from birth defects linked to pesticides. But their demands for cheaper access to adequate medical attention for those suffering the hidden costs of Chiles agricultural export boom has so far fallen on mostly deaf ears.

As Cerda looks at Rodrigo, who after 15 operations still shows outward signs of problems, including a cleft lip and an abnormally sized head due to hydrocephalus, she sees a boy as energetic and curious and fun-loving as any other. But because of exposure to pesticides, he's likely to need medical. attention for the rest of his life.

"Why do we keep allowing companies and governments to continue doing this?" she says. "What's missing is a fundamental respect for all life."

These powerful corporations often have revenues surpassing the incomes of the nations in which they do business.

The agrochemical industry's Big Six and the pesticides they sell in Latin America

These pesticides are either banned or severely restricted in the United States and European Union.

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Bayer
aciflourfen, aldicarb, azinphos-methyl, carbofuran, endosulfan, fenthion, lindane, mancozeb methamidofos, methomyl, methyl parathion, triazophos

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Syngenta
ametryn, atrazine, methidathion, monocrotophos, paraquat

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BASF
aciflourfen, captan, carbofuran, chlorfenapyr, chlorfenvinphos, methamidofos, methomyl, monocrotophos, permethrin, terbufos, tridemorph

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Dow
2,4,5-T, carbofuran, atrazine, chlorpyrifos, ethylene dibromide, mancozeb, monocrotophos, pentachlorophenol, phosphamidon

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Monsanto
butachor

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DuPont
mancozeb, methomyl, hexazinone

Sources:

Web sites of companies listed here; pesticide registration lists of various Latin American governments; Pesticideinfo.org; Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov/oppfead1/international/piclist.htm; Pesticide Action Network, "Food and Fairness Briefing: Which Pesticides Are Banned in Europe?" unpublished article; Paula Barrios, "The Rotterdam Convention on Hazardous Chemicals: A Meaningful Step Toward Environmental Protection?" Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, Summer 2004.

Photo captions:

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Spraying kiwi vines with pesticide in Chile's Central Valley, Region VI

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"Pesticides are poisonous," warns a poster at a workshop for Chilean farm workers.

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In Central America, several pesticides that are classified as "extremely or very dangerous" have been downgraded to "dangerous" or "slightly toxic."

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Before she died in 2003, Evelyn Orellana, pictured here in 1995, suffered from severe birth defects, including hydrocephalus. Both her parents worked as fruit pickers before her birth.

Jimmy Langman is a freelance journalist based in Chile and Bolivia. He has written about Latin American issues for Newsweek, The Nation, the London Guardian, and The Miami Herald.

Indo-Australian fund for GM crops research likely

The Financial Express (India), 24 April l2008. By Ashok B. Sharma.

New Delhi, Apr 23 India and Australia are likely to create a joint corpus to fund researches in transgenic crops in the public sector. Crops of common interest like cotton, wheat, chickpea and banana have been selected.

The two-day discussions between the agriculture scientists of both countries which concluded in Delhi on Tuesday suggested that the joint India-Australia agbiotech fund should be set up for a span of 12 years. It should provide at least $25 million per year for research in developing a particular trait per crop. Some traits identified for development are drought resistant, thermo-tolerance, salinity resistant, nutrient use efficiency and resistance to biotic stresses like insects, fungi and virus.

The scientists from the public sector in both the countries have decided to make this representation to their respective governments, after which official-level discussions would follow to pave the way for setting up of the joint fund for researches in GM crops.

"It is high time that India and Australia cooperate in development of transgenic crops for mutual benefit," said Gary Fitt, deputy chief, CSIRO Entomology, Longpocket Laboratories, Brisbane.

The scientists called for putting in place a mechanism under the proposed fund for rendering freedom to operate. Among other activities suggested under the proposed initiative include network development, supporting regulatory passage requirements, FTO analysis, assessing capability and field trial environment and phenomics.

"The work will be undertaken under regulatory regimes and bio-safety norms in respective countries," said KC Bansal, professor, NRC on plant biotechnology, Indian Agriculture Research Institute, Delhi.

Scientists from both the countries also called for facilitating material transfers for research and relaxation of the visa regime to allow frequent visits. Agronomic practices in both the countries would be evaluated. The fund would also be used to create consumer awareness about GM crops and food.

EU: Business organisation to be removed from European Parliament

EU Observer, 24 April 2008. By Honor Mahony.

BRUSSELS - The European Parliament is to take steps to sever the close links it has with a business scheme that operates from within the Brussels assembly to boost contacts between MEPs and companies.

The European Business and Parliament Scheme (EBPS), whose patron is parliament chief Hans-Gert Poettering, has an office in the parliament and its employees share the same email address as euro-deputies.

The set-up - after two initial refusals because of lack of space - was approved on 26 September 2007 by the quaestors of the parliament, MEPs who look after the administrative affairs of the Brussels house.

The scheme's 28 affiliated companies include major internationals such as software giant Microsoft, and the energy companies BP, RWE and Gaz de France.

It provides a range of programmes including "company attachments" in which MEPs or other senior officials of the parliament can spend a day or two with a company to provide "an insight" into how the business works.

The official website of the scheme states that "costs such as travel, accommodation and other programme-related expenses are covered from the European Parliament and the EBPS budgets."

A meeting of the parliament's political group leaders on Thursday (24 April) decided to discontinue the office and email arrangements after the matter was raised by Italian MEP Monica Frassoni, co-head of the Green group, who asked in a letter "whether [EBPS] was engaged in some kind of lobbying activity."

Speaking to EUobserver, Ms Frassoni noted that the website was "very open" and there is "nothing evil" about the scheme but that it was the "wrong decision" by the quaestors to grant this sort of access.

She said it was "totally inappropriate" that a scheme of co-operation between parliamentarians and big multinationals has an "office and mail with an europa.eu address and on its web is written that training and meetings will be paid by the European Parliament."

"The conference of presidents decided to delete this authorisation of opening an office and a mail."

A spokesperson for Hans-Gert Poettering explained the European Parliament president has "granted patronage to very many things" and that being the EPBS patron and the set-up "are two completely separate things."

Frederick Hyde-Chambers, secretary-general of the European Business and Parliament Scheme, pointed out that the European Parliament as such does not make any "direct contributions" to the scheme.

The reference to payments on the website referred to money from MEPs allowances. If this is not enough, funds are supplied by companies, who pay a membership fee, he told the EUobserver.

Mr Hyde-Chambers said such a scheme between business and national parliaments has been in place around the world for thirty years - the International Association of Business and Parliament - and said that there is "quite a sophisticated mechanism" to ensure that it is not just a pure lobbying set up.

Thursday's decision comes in the context of wider moves by the parliament to clean up the workings of the house.

It recently revamped its pay system for MEPs making the travel reimbursement system more transparent, and it has pledged to regularise the allowances for MEPs' assistants after a damaging internal audit exposed cases of fraud.

In addition, a report on lobbying voted on in committee last month called for a mandatory register of lobbyists working in the EU institutions - a parliament spokesperson said it would be "not quite logical" to adopt the report in plenary next month with this organisation within the parliament's walls.

23 April 2008

EU: Bold majority of stakeholders demand GMO thresholds in seed at the detection limit

Save Our Seeds, 23 April 2008.

A stakeholder meeting organized by the European Commission on the "adventitious presence" of GMOs in seeds on Wednesday 23. April has revealed a bold majority of stakeholders asking for the maximum purity of seeds to be obtained in any further legislation.

The Commission presented the results of an electronic consultation of a total of 243 representatives of member state authorities, farmers, industry, NGOs and individual citizens conducted last year.

The results of this survey, which will soon be published on the Commissions website, include that over 70% of all respondents estimated, that the higher the threshold levels for GMOs in seeds are set, the more GM plants will disseminate in the environment possibly causing adverse effects. A majority about 60% rejected the notion that zero presence was impossible, and 70 % disagreed with any need to recognize "adventitious presence" of GMOs in seeds as well as the concept to establish thresholds just "as low as feasible and proportionate". The highest level of approval for a specific threshold level was for 0,1%, the lowest option, in all stakeholder groups, including industry and public administration. With the exception of industry more than 50% of the stakeholders opted for the lowest threshold, while other thresholds of 0,3% or 0,5 % were rejected by more than 70%.

The Commission plans to complete an impact assessment of different options for GMO thresholds in seeds by June. It will then be up to a political discussion which options to chose.

For further Details see: http://www.saveourseeds.org/en/frame.php?page=consultation

Contact:

Benny Haerlin
Save Our Seeds
Marienstr.19-20, 10117 Berlin, Germany
+49 30 27590309
info@saveourseeds.org, www.saveourseeds.org

'Era of cheap food is over,' says EU

World Business Council on Sustainable Development / Environmental News Network / EurActiv.com, 23 April 2008.

EU consumers should get used to paying more for food as prices for meat, grain, cereal and a range of agricultural commodities are set to increase further, according to EU officials and MEPs debating the issue in Strasbourg yesterday (22 April). The EU's current push for biofuels came under repeated scrutiny during the discussion.

We won't see food prices going back down to former levels," EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel told a Strasbourg audience of MEPs convened to discuss the global food crisis.

The "huge rise" in food prices is a threat to global stability, according to Michel, who announced an increase in EU spending on food aid to developing countries.

But Michel also stressed that solving the crisis is "far beyond the EU's ability", pointing to structural problems in world agricultural markets and, in particular, a lack of purchasing power in poorer countries.

Empty bellies

Global average food prices have risen by 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank, which notes a particularly sharp increase in the past six months. While EU citizens have to dig deeper into their pockets to meet rising costs, in many poor nations - where hundreds of millions of families and individuals live on less than one euro per day - the increase means the difference between poverty and starvation.

Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), has compared the crisis to the 2004 Asian tsunami, and is calling for "large-scale, high-level action by the global community, focused on emergency and longer-term solutions".

The crisis has also raised concerns that the UN's objective of halving global poverty by 2015, the so-called Millenium Development Goals, will not be met.

'Hedge foods'

Growing demand for previously unaffordable meat and other 'luxury' foods in rapidly developing nations like China, India and Brasil is frequently cited as one of the main drivers of higher prices.

But during their debate, a number of MEPs also pointed to increased food commodities speculation and profiteering in the wake of the recent melt-down of global financial markets. The implication, according to a number of Socialist MEPs in particular, is that players on the financial markets have scrambled to find new profits, and are deliberately driving down food supplies while pushing demand in order to boost the price of food commodities.

Calls for greater regulation of financial markets have raised red flags in Brussels, where the EU's Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson recently warned against using the crisis as an excuse for greater agricultural protectionism (EurActiv 21/04/08).

Bashing biofuels

There are growing concerns that a greater shift from food production towards biomass-for-biofuels production will further aggravate food shortages and price concerns.

Italy's outgoing prime minister, Romano Prodi, most recently addressed the issue at the International Energy Forum in Rome on 22 April. Competition between food and fuels is creating a conflict that could result in "disastrous social conflicts and dubious environmental results," he said.

The office of Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, also promised on 22 April to "push for a change" in the EU's biofuels policy if a UK government review finds that the policy is counter-productive in terms of food prices and environmental sustainability.

Brussels meanwhile continues to defend its biofuels proposals.

"Biofuels have become a scapegoat for recent commodity price increases that have other causes ó poor harvests worldwide and growing food demand generated by increased standards of living in China and India," EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs wrote in a blog post on 28 March.

A number of MEPs have also cautioned against 'throwing out the baby with the bath water', arguing that biofuels have only a marginal impact on food price hikes and that structural changes to world food markets, as well as greater agricultural output from Africa, would largely cancel out the food price impact of biofuels production.

The GMO solution?

While most MEPs agreed during their debate that greater agricultural productivity is needed to address the crisis, views differed sharply about the benefits of using biotechnology and genetically modified (GM) crops in order to boost harvests in the EU and in developing states.

There is also speculation that the extent of the price hikes may push EU consumers towards a generally more favourable view of GM crops. EU citizens "hearts may be on the left, but their pockets are on the right," said MEP Neil Parish, chairman of the Parliament's agriculture committee, the International Herald Tribune reported.

But a collection of EU consumer, family farm and environmental groups remain opposed to GM crops. In a statement issued to MEPs as part of the debate, the groups argue that "there is little evidence to suggest that weakening the GMO regime in Europe will address [the crisis]. Price increases have occurred all over the world ó even in the US which has the most permissive system of GM approvals".

Positions

The 22 April Strasbourg debate drew a range of reactions across party lines.

French Christian Democrat MEP Joseph Daul , chairman of the EPP-ED group, said that agrofuels (or biofuels) are "not to blame" for the crisis, particularly in Europe, where agro-fuels production accounts for only 2% of the bloc's total agricultural output. Europe needs to "think seriously" about GM crops, he added.

The leader of the Socialists (PES), German MEP Martin Schulz , focused on the "considerable speculation" in global food markets. "Casino capitalism has taken a seat at the table of the poor. This is immorality carried to the extreme. This is why we need international controls on financial markets," Schulz said in a press statement.

UK MEP Graham Watson , chairman of the Liberals (ALDE), argued for a greater reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which he sees as the "root cause" of the problem. Watson also argued against an excessive focus on biofuels. "While it is true that bio-fuels increase demand for crops and displace food production the reasons for the recent food price rises are many and varied and so must be the international community's response", he said.

But independent UK MEP Graham Booth called on the EU to reverse its biofuels policy immediately, arguing that is is a "key factor in the surge in food prices around the world".

German Green MEP Rebecca Harms was slightly more measured in her stance on the issue. "Agrofuels alone are not to blame for the rise in food prices, but they are exacerbating the current crisis. Agrofuels only make sense when they contribute to climate protection and that is not currently the case," she said.

Latest & next steps

June 2008: Commission expected to table a universal model for the calculation of transport-related external costs and an impact assessment of various internalisation strategies.

Links

EU official documents

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Commission: Common Agricultural Policy: http://europa.eu/pol/agr/index_en.htm

Parliament

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Joseph Daul MEP, Chairman of the Christian Democrats (EPP-ED): Food prices: Transform agriculture to guarantee supply (22 April) http://www.epp-ed.eu/Press/showpr.asp?PRControlDocTypeID=1
&PRControlID=7320&PRContentID=12774&PRContentLG=en

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Martin Schulz MEP, leader of the Socialists (PES): Schulz blames "Casino Capitalism" for global food crisis. (22 April) http://www.socialistgroup.eu/gpes/newsdetail.do?lg=en&id=80617&href=home

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Graham Watson MEP, leader of Alliance of Liberal Democrats (ALDE): Food price rises: Biofuels only a small part of a bigger problem (22 April) http://www.alde.eu/index.php?id=42&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=9461&cHash=9b3f3de536

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Greens/EFA group: Food prices/agrofuels: Greens call for moratorium on agrofuels (22 April) http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/pressreleases/dok/230/230140.food_pricesagrofuels@en.htm

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European United Left / Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) Food crisis: "a humanitarian tsunami" in the making (22 April) link

Governments

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US Department of Agriculture (USDA): Global Food Markets http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/GlobalFoodMarkets/

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Amber Waves (USDA): Converging Patterns in Global Food Consumption and Food Delivery Systems (February 2008)
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/February08/Features/CovergingPatterns.htm

EU actors positions

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EU family farmers, consumer cooperatives and environmental NGOs: Oral question: Zero tolerance regime for unauthorised GMOs and economic consequences thereof (22 April joint press release) http://www.eurocoop.coop/publications/en/position/positionpdf/letteranimalfeedEPquestions08.pdf

International organizations

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United Nations World Food Programme: 'The silent tsunami' (22 April press release) http://www.wfp.org/english/

Blogs

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EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs: Biofuels and food ó regaining a sense of proportion http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/piebalgs/biofuels-and-food-‚-regaining-a-sense-of-proportion/

Press articles

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AP: World Food Program warns of 'silent tsunami' of hunger (23 April) http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVMIPi3dMFpmC3mUr_kNyximdCvwD9078FSG0

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International Herald Tribune: In lean times, biotech grains are less taboo (21 April) http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/21/business/21crop.php

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AFP: Biofuels under fire at International Energy Forum (22 April) http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gOjo4WarrYFlvJt5N_nvSb3VIicA

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Cnet: The biofuel factor in rising food prices http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9918741-54.html

World Food Crisis and Starvation: Made in America
Speculation, biofuels and forced deregulation leave 3 billion to face death by starvation

Independent Media Center, New York, 23 April 2008. By Penny Hess.

In America - especially in white America - we take food abundance for granted. From sushi to steak to salad and smoothies, countless food choices are part of our daily routine and a key component of our leisure and fun. One hundred and thirty-four million of us - 75 percent of the adult U.S. population - are obese or overweight. (http://win.niddk.nih.gov/statistics/index.htm#preval)

Even the choice to be slim and fit based on a healthy diet is an option not available to most of humanity. For the majority of us hunger is no more than a momentary pang endured until the next refrigerator, restaurant, deli or grocery presents itself.

For 3 billion people around the world who are facing starvation, the chance for something edible has little to do with nutrition or leisure or fun. Anything to eat is a fleeting panacea for the pain of a chronically empty stomach, a pain that has been compared to battery acid in the abdomen. Thirty people a minute are dying of starvation (http://www.starvation.net) in a world where half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day.

In the news these days are reports of massive food rebellions in more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Haiti 80 percent of the population no longer have the resources to eat food. Millions in Haiti are forced to subsist on mud mixed with sugar and shortening. YouTube videos show UN and government police forces firing on crowds of angry people in Haiti, Egypt, Mexico and El Salvador:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmHPVMEROmE Ý
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPYBEJnsb0M Ý
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOqOuySygnk Ý
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB_fbdAzKUo Ý

For most of us in North America such realities may seem sad but very far removed for our lives. Ultimately, we believe, world starvation has nothing to do with us.

Living in a country built on the enslavement of African people, the genocide against the Indigenous people, and the spoils of colonial domination the world over, global hunger has, however, everything to do with us.

The reality is that every aspect of this world food crisis is made in white America, by Americans, for America's economic benefit. Today's skyrocketing rice and grain prices are not the result of shortages! We are seeing record rice crops globally this year! As an Asia Times article, "Rice, death and the dollar" states, "The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, a Ö consequence of America's attempt to inflate its way out of a market failureÖ" (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD22Dj01.html)

Here are some of the real factors contributing to the current rapid rise in food costs and starvation worldwide.

Wall Street speculation. With the dollar tanking and banks and corporations going bankrupt (and being bailed out by the government and the Fed), commodities, such as grains and agriculture are the hottest Wall Street investment sector today! For investors they are a "safe haven" against "the falling dollar and the loss of faith in stock markets." (Energyandcapital.com)

As a last ditch effort to save the U.S. economy with the bursting of the housing bubble, investors are now creating a grains bubble, driving prices off the charts, regardless of the cost of suffering for the majority of the world.

Average prices for rice have reached a 20-year high this month, with Thai rice going up from $360 a ton in December 2007 to $850 this week. Investors are working overtime trying to get a piece of these profits, while those living on a dollar or two a day can't afford even a plate of rice.

Billionaire Jim Rogers is on TV constantly advising people to "buy agriculture!" Tellingly the blog Energy and Capital describes the brutal conditions of starvation for most of the world's impoverished people, talks about the grain price hikes, says there is "no relief in sight," and then ends with the statement: "Öenough of the doom and gloom. How can I profit from this? Well, I'm gonna tell youÖ" (http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/grain-food+prices-commodities/663)

You can be sure that now all the bad subprime mortgage bonds in your money market or retirement funds have been replaced with commodities investments. How many children must die for our baby boomers to enjoy a "secure" retirement?

Biofuels are genocide. Wall Street investors are creating an ethanol bubble too, driving up the prices of grain grown for fuel rather than for food. Farmers around the world can no longer afford to grow grain for food when the earnings for fuel are far greater!

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro has been campaigning for the past couple of years against biofuels. He has called ethanol "genocide," saying that biofuels will "cost the lives of 3 billion people."

Castro's article, "The Internationalization of Genocide," states, "The five top producers of the corn, barley, sorghum, rye, millet and oats that Bush wants to turn into raw materials for producing ethanol supply 679 million tons of the world marketÖIn turn, the five top consumers, some of which are also producers of these grains, currently need 604 million tons annually. The available surplus comes down to less than 80 million tons."

Castro adds, "This colossal waste of cereals for producing fuelÖwould serve only to save the rich countries less than 15 percent of what is annually consumed by their voracious automobiles." (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/castro050407.html)

Forced deregulation of world agricultural markets. Historically countries around the world produced food for themselves and their governments kept restrictions on the price of food to prevent speculation and price gouging. Haiti, where the people are today forced to subsist on a steady diet of mud, is a perfect example. Twenty-five years ago Haitian farmers grew and exported their own rice.

But in the late 1980s the U.S. backed IMF forced Haiti, as a condition for a desperately needed loan, to deregulate their markets and open them up to competition from the outside. The U.S. then dumped its government-subsidized rice onto Haiti (and many other countries around the world), selling the American rice cheaper than Haiti farmers could sell theirs for. The U.S. rice dumping brought to an abrupt halt Haiti's own self-sufficient agricultural infrastructure and forced millions of people into desperate poverty.

U.S. Agribusiness. According to Gretchen Gordon in, "The Food Crisis: Global Markets and Deregulation Strike Again," three major corporations, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge, "control the vast majority of global grain trading, while Monsanto controls more than one-fifth of the global market in seeds."

While billions of human beings are starving, Cargill's third quarter 2007 profits increased more than 86 percent and Monsanto's were up 45 percent. In fact they are using the current crisis to further impose their genetically modified seeds on the peoples of the world.

The U.S. will not be immune from this crisis. Almost 22 percent of African families in the U.S. experience food insecurity - not knowing where their next meal will come from. One out of twelve Indigenous families forced onto reservations on their own land experience food insecurity with hunger. (http://www.wole.org/hunger.htm)

Throughout the U.S. the African community has been hit hard by the collapse of the subprime mortgage scam, which again made Wall Street bankers and investors billions of dollars. Cities with high African populations, such as Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit and Atlanta are seeing tens of thousands of families facing foreclosure and homelessness as a result of this. When the full weight of this crisis hits over the next couple of years millions of African people in America will be plunged even more deeply into poverty.

What can we do?

The United Nations, the U.S. government and the websites of countless organizations are calling for donations of money for food for some of these countries. Charity, however, will never solve this problem, any more than Bush's little tax refund will prevent the downturn of the U.S. economy.

The only thing that will really change this crisis is the end of a system that acts as a parasite sucking the blood of the peoples of the world. Let's face it: the prosperity of the white world is directly dependent on slavery, genocide and theft of the resources of just about everyone else. For us to live, they can't! World peace and cooperation is, of course, forever impossible under such a system.

Going "green" in and of itself is no solution! Environmentalism inside of a system sitting on a pedestal of slavery and colonialism will do nothing but make us feel good for recycling bottles or saving the ozone, while the majority of people continue to suffer and die. Environmental destruction is simply a byproduct of a system that wipes out whole peoples and civilizations to maintain our life style!

What will end hunger and starvation is when the earth's oppressed peoples finally have control over their land, resources, lives and destinies again. The people of Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela, along with African, Mexican and Indigenous people colonized inside this country are struggling for this. This is the struggle for national liberation.

The Uhuru Movement has built the African Socialist International (ASI), made up of African individuals and organizations in Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean, South America, Europe - wherever African people have been dispersed around the world.

The ASI is based on the premise that Africans are one people everywhere and that the food, diamonds, oil, coltan, bauxite, uranium and all the resources of Africa are the birthright of African people the world over, not corporations and Western imperial nations.

The Uhuru Movement, led by the African People's Socialist Party has built the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) in the U.S. and Africa. InPDUM is a people's organization that defends the democratic rights of the African community that has been massively imprisoned, placed under martial law and subjected to oppressive educational systems worldwide.

Other dynamic fronts of the Uhuru Movement include the All African People's Development and Empowerment Program (AAPDEP), organizing African scientists, engineers and health care workers from the U.S. to participate in sustainable electrification, rain water harvesting and heath care projects in West Africa.

There is the African Internationalist Student Organization (AISO) for African students from middle school through graduate school. Uhuru News features the on-line radio station Uhuru Radio, Burning Spear Records and The Burning Spear newspaper. Another front, the African People's Solidarity Committee (APSC), is an organization of white people working in white communities under the leadership of the Uhuru Movement

White people who find that living at the expense of the suffering of the vast majority of humanity is intolerable can join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement led by APSC. You and I can make a difference, not as mere consumers of information, but by taking a real stand in solidarity for the future of the planet in the hands of African and oppressed people. (www.Uhurunews.com)

A stand in solidarity with African and oppressed people everywhere allows us to be part of a great movement to end the system of starvation, of slaves and slave masters and participate in building a system of justice and peace. As the source of most of the problems in today's world, imperialism must go. In its place must be a system built on justice, equity and human needs, not profit, greed and exploitation. This is the vision of the movement for African liberation.

Let's get to work. There is so much to do.

Penny Hess is the Chairwoman of the African People's Solidarity Committee, an organization of white people working under the leadership of the African People's Socialist Party which leads the Uhuru Movement. Hess is the author of Overturning the Culture of Violence and All Diamonds are Blood Diamonds. Her blog can be viewed at www.apscuhuru.org

Australia: Soy farmers voice fears over GM crops

The Northern Star, 23 April 2008. By Emma O'Neill.

A FOREIGN pest could destroy Australia's soy bean industry.

That was the fear of soy bean grower Stuart Larsson, as he prepared to harvest his crop in Mallanganee this week.

This foreign pest doesn't have six legs, instead it has three initials - GMO (genetically modified organisms) - and they're sending shivers down the spines of soy bean growers across the nation, according to Mr Larsson.

He believes the success of the Australian soy bean industry rests on the ban of GMOs during the harvest and production of the bean.

"The Australian soy bean market isn't competitive worldwide in terms of production," Mr Larsson said.

"The only reason we are surviving is because we are one of the only remaining GMO-free markets. It's vital we stay that way.

"The government lifted the ban on using GMOs on canola in February, and if the ban was lifted on soy beans as well it would be devastating."

The lifting of the GMO ban on canola crops wasn't good news for soy bean growers, according to local agriculture academic Dave Forrest.

"Soy bean growers are already on the list as one of the next crops to lift the ban, and now that the door is open for bees to travel from canola to soy crops," Mr Forrest said. "It will make it hard for growers to prove to overseas markets that their soy beans are GMO-free.

"Soy bean crops are a big money earner for the Northern Rivers. If the industry was affected it would cost the economy as well as farmers."

District agronomist at Casino, Bede Clarke, said around 80 per cent of soy beans in the world are genetically modified, and confirmed the success of Australia's soy bean industry - especially in relation to markets in South Korea and Japan - relied on keeping their GMO-free label.

Mr Clarke confirmed that this season's soy bean crops in the Northern Rivers region had been reduced because of the January floods and an unusually short summer.

"Usually we would have about 6000 hectares of soy beans in the area. This year we have around 4500 hectares," he said.

"A lot of crops were damaged after the floods and people didn't have enough time to replant before the end of January, which is the best time."

While Mr Larrson said these two weather-related factors had combined to reduce his harvest to less than 50 per cent of his usual yield - the erratic weather was not of as much concern as the looming GMO issue.

USA: FBI: Food safety requires constant vigilance

MyIDaccess.com, 23 April 2008.

NEW YORK ‚ An FBI agent said yesterday that constant vigilance on the part of everyone is needed to keep the American food supply safe, Dow Jones reported.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Section Chief Jenifer Smith, speaking to a general session of the third annual International Symposium on Agroterrorism in Kansas City, said keeping out diseases from U.S. crops and livestock is the number one priority for her division of the FBI, and an act of terrorism could come at any point in the production cycle.

People expect safe food, Smith said, plus it has a high value to the domestic economy. She noted commodities such as cattle, poultry, dairy, crops and hogs contributed $159.6 billion to the economy in 2004, adding that international trade is directly affected by the absence of disease in any commodity.

Smith said threats to the food supply can come from domestic and international sources. She said anti-biotechnical groups like the Earth Liberation Front and lesser-known domestic extremist groups often inflict vandalism and violence threats. Their efforts are meant to discourage research into genetically modified plants and organisms as well as disease research and have been successful in driving some scientists away from the research, she said.

In the post 9/11 era, Smith said it is imperative that more is done to pre-empt and disrupt potential acts of terrorism against U.S. agriculture. Because of this, the FBI is using the Patriot Act to clamp down on these groups to deter terrorist attacks in the U.S. and abroad, she said.

Those efforts tie in with the counter-terrorism work against groups like al-Qaida, Smith said. Such groups are well aware of the potential to terrorize and disrupt the U.S. economy, even if they have not yet chosen to do so, she said.

To accomplish that, Smith indicated that the U.S. has been working with other countries to track down reported terrorist plans. Just because there is no current obvious threat to the U.S. food supply doesn't mean one isn't being planned, Smith said, emphasizing, "constant vigilance" is key.

Swiss food retailers demand information on nanotech

FoodQualityNews.com, 23 April 2008. By Chris Jones.

Switzerland's leading food retailers have introduced a new code of conduct that will oblige their food and packaging suppliers to provide detailed information about nanotechnology products.

The code, drawn up by the IG DHS, the Swiss retailers association, is in part a response to the fierce criticism drawn by some store operators after they stocked genetically modified (GM) food.

"Companies such as Migros and Coop had a very negative experience over GM products," said Christopher Meili, CEO of The Innovation Society, a Swiss company specialising in nanotechnology risk management.

"They wanted to avoid that bad consumer publicity when it came to nanotechnology," Meili told FoodProductionDaily.com.

His company worked with the retailers to assess the potential risks from nanotech products in food and packaging and to draw up the code of conduct.

According to Meili, Swiss consumers do not necessarily have a negative attitude towards nanotech.



"Consumers are not sceptical about nanotech as such. But with food, consumers want to know what it is that they are eating, and to be able to make informed decisions." That is why, he said, the code of conduct requires food producers to provide information to retailers about any products that contain nanotech particles.

The Swiss retailers have used the definition of 'nano' used by the national government - particles that are 100 nanometers in diameter or less - but Meili stressed that this was just a "working definition" and that it would have to be refined over time.

But he said that setting it this small would probably avoid ingredients firms having to declare their products as nanotech, as products such as vitamins were broadly speaking around 300 nanometers in diameter.

He said that there had been no feedback from - or consultation with - food producers when the code was drawn up, but stressed that the retailers expected to hear from their suppliers in the near future once the code became more widely known.

And Meili suggested that it might be packaging suppliers who would be most badly affected by the code of conduct.

"There are several nano products already widely used in the food packaging sector, and producers will have to provide information on these now."

He suggested that products such as nanosilver - a biocide used in many packaging products for food as a protection against bacteria - could be caught by the new code.

"Nanosilver is used in many products, but nobody really knows what happens if it migrates from the packaging to the food," he said.

The US environmental protection agency in 2006 decided to regulate nanosilver and assess its impact on the environment, but it is not yet regulated in Europe.

Other nano particles used in food packaging include titanium dioxide, which is a UV blocker, while silicon oxide is used a barrier layer.Ý

USA: What are GMOs good for, again?
Study: transgenic soy brings lower yields than conventional crop

Gristmill blog, 23 April 2008. By Tom Philpott. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) came to dominate U.S. grain agriculture over the last 12 with very little real public debate. Sure, people like me have complained loudly, and groups like Center for Food Safety have mounted forceful lobbying and public education efforts.

But U.S. policymakers have ignored these criticisms and chosen to wave these epoch-making technologies from the lab to the field to the plate with minimal oversight. That's at least partially because Monsanto, the dominant GMO seed producer, has managed to place its own people in high policy-making positions -- particularly during the 1990s, when the Clinton administration opened the floodgates for GMOs. The most glaring example (by no means the only) is Michael Taylor, who represented Monsanto as an attorney in the late 1980s. I'll let his bio take it from here:

He was Administrator of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service from 1994 to 1996, Deputy Commissioner for Policy at the Food and Drug Administration from 1991 to 1994, and an FDA staff lawyer and Executive Assistant to the FDA Commissioner from 1976 to 1981. He practiced food and drug law and was a partner in the law firm of King & Spalding for ten years and most recently was Vice President for Public Policy at Monsanto Company.

But if (often hand-picked) government regulators have been very, very good to GMOs and the corporations that dominate their production, academic research is starting to stack against them. From the Independent:

Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.

Ouch. The Independent points to a recent University of Kansas study showing that Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans (designed to withstand copious lashings of Monsanto's own weed killer, Roundup) deliver yields 10 percent lower than conventional beans. The U. of Kansas verdict comes on the heels of a similar one from researchers at the University of Nebraska. The yield question is key. For years, enthusiasts for genetically modified organisms have argued that GM crops deliver higher yields. And since they deliver higher yields, we desperately need them in order to "feed the world."

According to the Independent, the Kansas researchers concluded that the very process of gene-splicing seems to lower a plant's productivity. GM cotton, too, has shown lower yields. Now, wait a minute. Since their release in 1994, Monsanto's Roundup Ready seeds have conquered the U.S. farm belt and now account for upwards of 90 percent of soy, 60 percent of cotton, and half of corn. Over the same period, we've seen a gusher of Monsanto's Roundup weed killer -- and an explosion in superweeds. It's getting increasingly hard to imagine who benefits from GMOs besides Monsanto, with its monopoly profits.

Bangladesh: GM crops or not?

The New Nation, 23 April 2008.

SPEAKERS at a seminar expressed their concern that the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) rice would ruin ecological balance in the long run. They informed that the cultivation of GM rice is controlled or banned in the countries of Europe. The introduction of biotechnology gave rise to a sharp controversy as to whether GM food would be harmful or helpful for humans and nature. Proponents of genetic modification base their arguments on the need to feed growing world's population which has already crossed 6 billion mark and is predicted to double within the next 50 years. They say that GM foods promise to meet this demand.

According to them, through biotechnology it is possible to develop crops resistant to pests, diseases, cold and drought and even to salinity. Genetic engineering would make production of more nutritious crops possible. GM plants would also help keep pollution low. But according to critics of genetic engineering, GM foods would create hazards in the environment, human health and economy. Genetic modification may cause harm to other organisms like bees or butterflies that are essential for pollination of crops. This technology may lead to gene transfer to non-target species of plants and animals. Introduction of gene into a plant may create new allergens to cause life-threatening allergic reaction among the consumer. Should Bangladesh adopt bio-technology to grow sufficient food to feed the fast growing population? If this option is taken the country will have to take every precautions. GM crops must be tested on a case-to-case basis before introduction. Indiscriminate introduction of GM crops may prove counter - productive. Before adoption of biotechnology Bangladesh must ensure bio-safety and conservation of the natural system. Bangladesh has a bio-safety law. It needs to be enforced urgently.

Italy embarrassed by counterfeit olive oil scandal

The Guardian (UK), 23 April 2008. By John Hooper.

ROME -- It looked like extra virgin olive oil. It even tasted and smelt like extra virgin olive oil. But the alluring, yellowy green liquid that consumers in Germany, Switzerland and the US would have trickled over their salads was actually oil made from soya beans or sunflower seeds - some of it genetically modified - mixed with beta carotene and industrial chlorophyll.

After the discovery in recent months of dioxin in mozzarella and added ethanol in wine, officials yesterday hastened to reassure consumers in the wake of yet another Italian food scandal. On Monday, police arrested 39 people and impounded more than 25,000 litres of counterfeit extra virgin oil. It was due to be exported, or marketed in Italy, in bottles bearing the labels of non-existent companies.

Vincenzo Russo, the prosecutor who ordered the raids, said: "Of itself, the product was not harmful."

But he added that the oil had been manufactured on premises that were not subject to public health checks.

The agriculture minister in Italy's outgoing centre-left government, Paolo De Castro, said the affair was "a demonstration that the checks are there, and are efficient". But the industry association representing Italian olive oil producers said the fraud was "the tip of the iceberg". It added, however, that a new law on mandatory labelling was proving effective.

The latest scandals have caused intense embarrassment to a nation that prides itself on the purity of its foodstuffs. The head of a major farmers' union, Sergio Marini, welcomed the investigations, but he warned that the damage to the image of Italian produce could be enough to decide whether the economy grew or shrank this year.

A statement from a consumers association, ADUC, said there was a risk that when foreign consumers "buy Italian produce [they] will have the same doubts as when they buy Chinese products".

Ireland: If ever the world needed GM food production, it's right now

Irish Independent, 23 April 2008. By Kevin Myers.

The dilemma is simple. The sustained hysteria over global warming is finally beginning to cost lives -- as it was bound to. Ignoring the laws of nature -- and the market place is nature at its purest -- will always exact a price. And the price is usually paid by the weakest and the most vulnerable in a society: of course, this will not include -- and never could include -- the well-heeled humbugs who have driven the hysteria in the first place.

We were told that one way of tackling global warming was to burn biofuels rather than fossil fuels: since replacement crops will absorb the carbon dioxide created when the biofuels combust, the transaction is said to be "carbon neutral".

Governments have thus been rewarding producers for growing biofuels -- with the result that in the US, many farmers prefer to grow them rather than food. Listen: I was the worst student ever to pass first-year economics at UCD, but I still understand the consequences of cutting supply. Prices go up.

And that's what's happened. Rice is roughly twice the price that it was a year ago. That's irritating for us, but perfectly catastrophic for the poor of the world. So serious is the problem that India (among many other countries) has outlawed the export of rice: a further interference in the market. And that's the way of such things: one correction obliges the market-molester to endlessly correct as the initial distortion caused by the first correction begins to rock the entire structure. No-one can manage the consequences, because they are too complex and unpredictable.

Now, you might argue that increasing the price of food is a necessary, if tragic, step towards saving the world from global warming. But it is a strange morality indeed which also campaigns against a technology that could both make food cheaper, and biofuels easier to grow.

Yet the science of genetic modification can unleash the vast untapped resources which are locked up in the DNAs of different species.

As Swift so aptly put it: "that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together".

Quite. Yet it is the political classes in Europe, with the eco-mob at their heels -- they who wax so hysterical about global warming -- who have prevented the development of GM products here. Supermarkets even boast "We sell no GM products", as witless as the 19th-century apothecary's response to Edward Jenner's discoveries: "No vaccination here".

Simply, GM will enable us to increase plant production, without greater use of fertiliser, for three purposes: to grow biofuels, to produce greater vegetable crops, and, finally, to cultivate special plants whose sole duty is carbon imprisonment. This last function is what the molluscs of the oceans did millions of years ago. By locking up atmospheric carbon in their tiny shells, in due course they became the great limestone, marble and chalk mountains of the world, thereby lowering the world's temperature, and making terrestrial life possible.

But the very people who grew hysterical at the prospect of GM crops five years ago are today at the forefront of shrieking about global warming. The mathematics of all this are quite simple. So too are the morals. What is less easy to understand is the philosophy which prevents us from the reaching the logical conclusion to which maths and morals direct us.

For if we are to move towards biofuels, either we have GM technology, or millions of people in the developing world (as it is incorrectly called, because a lot of it isn't developing at all) will die. There is no third way.

Now, you can argue that the world could do with a reduction of population, and since there is no obvious group rather altruistically volunteering for extinction, the winnowing out of unwanted bodies will have to occur naturally somewhere that the population is already growing faster than are local resources.

There is a name for such a place. It is Africa. Is this what people want? That Africans should die of hunger in their millions, in order that we should feel better because we are using carbon-neutral biofuels, even as we are outlawing the GM technology that will make those fuels, and foodstuffs, cheaper and more available?

It is an interesting morality which embraces this equation, especially since the mumbo-jumbo over global warming is usually propounded by people who declare themselves to be morally superior to just about everyone else on the planet.

You may just have gathered from my tone my position on this. It is that mankind can do almost nothing useful to lower global warming, and therefore we shouldn't try. But sideline that argument, and address the hypothetical possibilities of reducing CO2 levels by plant activity, without causing famine. That cannot be done without GM: moreover, changing the genes of plant life is what mankind has done ever since the invention of agriculture, in the alluvial gardens of Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago.

Comment from GM-free Ireland:

If Kevin Myers had done basic fact-checking like a responsible journalist, he would have known that the UN's International Assessment of Agriculture, Science and Technology (IAASTD) published last week rejects the agribusiness chemical intensive industrial farming model in favour of sustainable, organic and GM-free agriculture as the emerging scientific consensus to meet the food requirements of our expanding global population. He would also have come across the recent conclusive scientific studies which concur that GM crops do NOT have higher yields. But Kevin is famous for his opinionated rants, and this is nothing new.

Global food crisis prompts EU to boost emergency aid

EU Observer, 23 April 2008. By Leigh Phillips.

of the world's poorest citizens in reaction to soaring food prices spreads around the globe, the European Commission is to offer a further €117.25 million in emergency food aid in response to the impact of the increase in food prices on the world's most vulnerable people.

Making the announcement in the European Parliament, the commission's development chief, Louis Michel, said: "The rise in basic food prices is a worldwide humanitarian disaster in the making. Ongoing humanitarian food programmes are under enormous pressure with less food available for people already on the brink of starvation."

"Millions more, who were just about coping before, now risk going hungry," he added. "Addressing food price issue is a global challenge requiring long-term solutions but the emergency is now. We have an obligation to act - and act quickly."

"All analysts say that the era of cheap food is over. We won't see food prices going back down to former levels," he said, pointing out that the aid package was only a partial solution, but not enough to deal with what he called a "structural problem."

He called for a global mobilisation, warning that the crisis threatened "destabilisation in many countries around the world."

What has precipitated the crisis remains unclear, although a number of analysts have described the situation as "a perfect storm" combining a wide range of factors.

The Greens in the parliament used the occasion to call for a moratorium on biofuels, which have in the last year gone from a welcome solution in the fight against climate change to one of the villains behind the food crisis, along with export restrictions, poor harvests, speculation in commodity markets and rising oil prices.

Meanwhile, development NGOs argue that the cracking open of third world agricultural markets is partly to blame, but Western trade officials argue that markets have not opened enough.

Graham Watson, the leader of the Liberals in the parliament, pulled back from his group's previous robust support for European biofuels policy, while endorsing the view that the situation is complex.

"While it is true that bio-fuels increase demand for crops and displace food production the reasons for the recent food price rises are many and varied and so must be the international community's response," he said.

The free market came in for a beating from many MEPs, with repeated calls for increased regulation of speculators.

Leader of the Socialists, German MEP Martin Schultz blamed capitalism itself: "It is shocking that people are now speculating on increases in food prices. Banks are telling their clients to bet on soaring prices. The result is that there is now an incentive for speculators to create food shortages.

"Casino capitalism has taken a seat at the table of the poor. This is immorality carried to the extreme. This is why we need international controls on financial markets."

Commissioner Michel responded: "I'm not in love with capitalism. It's not the object of my affections, but a means to an end."

The latest humanitarian funding consists of €57.25 million taken from the existing food aid budget run by the commission's humanitarian aid department, and a requested €60 million in new money.

The commission has responded on a rolling basis as this crisis has developed. In the face of increasing needs, it committed €160 million - more than 70 percent of the available food aid funds - in a decision adopted in February. It has also fast-tracked the deployment of the rest of the budget with €6 million included in a special package for Bangladesh announced on 10 April.

'Silent tsunami'

Tuesday's announcement, which raises the EU's total food aid budget so far in 2008 to €283.25 million, comes as the head of the UN warned that the food crisis threatened global security.

Speaking to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) conference in Accra, Ghana, on the same day, UN General-Secretary Ban Ki-moon said: "If not handled properly, this crisis could result in a cascade of others ... and become a multidimensional problem affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world."

At the same time as the UNCTAD conference, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was hosting his own emergency meeting of experts in London to discuss the problem, with representatives from the World Food Programme, the African Development Bank, the head of supermarket chain Sainsbury's, development NGO Oxfam, agrochemicals firm Syngenta, Cargill Grain Traders and the UK's agricultural trade association, the National Farmers' Union.

Mr Brown called for a boost in research into new crop varieties and reiterated that a key solution was the signing of a global trade agreement that would open up markets in the West to agricultural exports from the developing world.

Following the meeting, WFP chief Josette Sheeran said that the crisis was the greatest challenge her organisation had faced in its 45-year history.

She called food price rises: "a silent tsunami threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger."'

"This is the new face of hunger - the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are," she said in a statement.

22 April 2008

UK: Busting myths about the food crisis

Socialist Worker, 22 April 2008. By Sadie Robinson.

Rocketing price rises are threatening to plunge tens of millions around the world into hunger and food insecurity.

The prices of maize, wheat, soya beans and rice - staple foods for the majority of the world's population - have more than doubled in the past few years. Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, warned earlier this month, "This is leading to a new face of hunger in the world, what we call the newly hungry. These are people who have money, but have been priced out of being able to buy food."

Many explanations have been put forward for the crisis - population growth, changing consumption patterns and climate change are some of the most popular.

But in reality it is the domination of food production by global capitalism that has reshaped agriculture and food markets and led to the crisis.

Some right wing economists argue that the current crisis is an aberration that will be corrected through the market. But starvation and food crises are inbuilt into capitalism - a system that is based on profit not need.

While millions face hunger and poverty, a tiny minority are making big profits from spiralling food prices.

Agribusiness giant Cargill - the second biggest private company in the world and a major grain trader - earlier this month announced that its quarterly profits have surged up 86 percent.

Of course the "free market" has never been entirely free - it relies on government tariffs, subsidies and economic policies.

Many governments around the world, terrified at the prospect of civil unrest, have banned exports of staple foods or looked for other ways of protecting domestic supplies.

This may give them a temporary breathing space, but it also causes sudden shortages and panics in international markets that can further inflate prices.

There is growing resistance to soaring food prices - and world leaders are right to be afraid of it. Price hikes have provoked strikes, protests and riots over the past few months in countries including Bangladesh, Burkino Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Yemen, Indonesia, Morocco, Senegal, Mauritania and Guinea (Conakry).

Thousands of workers are taking up the fight for the right to food. In Egypt the issue of bread prices was at the heart of recent strikes that shook the government, while in Bangladesh garment workers struck last week over the price of rice.

Surely one of the greatest indictments of the system is that capitalism can produce more than enough food but it lets people starve. Socialist Worker exposes five of the most common myths that surround the food crisis.

1.

There are too many people to feed

Many people argue that a growing global population explains the current food crisis.

This idea assumes that we have a limited pot of resources to go around. It doesn't recognise that people have the capacity to transform production methods to increase output.

The argument harks back to Thomas Malthus, an 18th century economist who claimed that increased wealth would lead to an unsustainable growth in population that would outstrip the resources available.

In fact food production has grown faster than population - global agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite the population of the world increasing.

Enough wheat, rice and other grains are already produced to provide every person in the world with 3,500 calories a day - before foods such as meat, vegetables, nuts or beans are taken into account.

Britain's department of health says that the average person needs about 2,500 calories a day to maintain a healthy lifestyle. The reality is that food production is marked by overproduction, not underproduction. People starve not because there is a lack of food but because they cannot afford to buy it.

The Russian revolutionary Lenin called Malthus's theory a "reactionary doctrine". He was right.

2.

Economic growth in China is to blame

A favourite theme in the mainstream media is that growing wealth in China is changing consumption patterns and pushing up prices. But even with dramatic economic changes in China, the consumption per head of the Chinese population is still around three times less than that of the US and Britain.

And while it's true that China's meat and dairy consumption has increased, China is still a net exporter of many foods - including rice, wheat and corn. China's increasing imports of food have been pushed by multinationals across the world eager to open up new markets for their produce and grab more profits.

3.

The market can solve the problem

The price of many foodstuffs is already determined through international markets. The economic crisis has inflated prices by pushing investors to put their money into food, which is seen as a "safe" alternative to other forms of financial speculation. Similarly, stockbrokers are now even placing bets on future water prices.

Speculation drives up food prices - and as prices rise, this in turn encourages more speculation. It also encourages stockpiling by food traders - who buy food purely to hold on to it and sell it at a higher price.

Several long-term trends have contributed to rising food prices. All of them result from the way that global capitalism impacts on the food industry.

Poorer countries have seen huge changes in land use over the past 30 years - resulting in less food being produced for domestic consumption.

Pressure from the US government and world bodies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank has been fundamental in reshaping the agriculture of poorer countries.

This pressure has been formalised through structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) - rebranded Poverty Reduction Strategies - agreements that poorer countries sign up to in order to receive aid or loans.

Key elements of the agreements include cutting public spending, increasing privatisation, and opening up the economy to global markets - with a devastating impact on agriculture.

In Senegal, for example, the government signed up to an SAP in 1986. Government programmes to support farmers were eliminated. Spending cuts and trade liberalisation meant that farmers could not compete with cheap food imports.

The effect was a decrease in the production of basic food crops for local consumption and a turn towards exports. By 1990 a third of the population was categorised as hungry - by 1992, that had risen to 40 percent.

Such policies reduce the ability of people in poorer countries to produce their own food and increase dependence on the global food industry. Over time this pushes up the average price of food.

Another factor pushing up prices is the rush to invest in biofuels - which divert food crops such as corn and wheat to be used for fuel. The US, the world's largest corn exporter, is expected to use nearly a third of its entire crop next year for biofuels.

Governments have also allowed food stocks to fall to an all-time low. In poorer countries, the IMF has explicitly discouraged governments from building up food stocks, arguing that this interferes with the "free market".

Some governments have been forced to sell their stocks in order to repay growing debts.

4.

It is all the fault of climate change

Climate change is a serious problem that impacts on agriculture - particularly in the Global South.

Although climate change in some areas has brought chaotic weather that damaged food crops, climate change alone does not lead to poverty or hunger.

The problem lies in the way that climate change - and the resulting impact on food - is dealt with. Many poor countries do not have the infrastructure to deal with climate change.

It is estimated that Bangladesh, for example, would need to spend £2 billion to build embankments, cyclone shelters, roads and other infrastructure needed to deal with the effects of climate change.

Yet ten million poor people in Bangladesh face the devastation of flooding every year because the investment hasn't been made.

Blaming climate change for the food crisis ignores the fact that we live in a world divided by class - rich people in countries that have seen crops destroyed by floods or droughts will still have plenty to eat.

It also lets governments off the hook. Climate change does not make hunger inevitable - but it is another urgent issue that world leaders are failing to deal with.

5.

Genetically modified crops are the answer

Genetically modified (GM) crops are sometimes put forward as the solution to world hunger. GM crops are modified in ways that make them resistant to disease, changes in climate or insects and as a result can produce higher yields.

But the introduction of GM foods has not ended hunger - it has increased inequality.

It has allowed multinational biotechnology companies to increase their control over global food production and intensified the dependence of poor countries on richer ones.

New research by the University of Kansas has shown that genetic modification cuts the productivity of crops, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.

The study - carried out over the past three years in the US grain belt - has found that GM soya produces about 10 percent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.

There are also many serious question marks over the safety of GM foods.

The promotion of GM foods uses similar arguments to those used in the so-called "Green Revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Green Revolution developed varieties of seeds and crops that could produce higher yields. It was promoted in India as a way of staving off famine and dealing with hunger.

Yet today 233 million Indians are undernourished and malnutrition has increased throughout the 1990s.

Food production can grow at the same time as hunger - because hunger today is a result of how food production is organised, not the amount of food produced.

22 April, Earth Day 2008

Ireland: GM resistance

Clare People, 22 April 2008.

In a press statement last week, the UK National Beef Association called for all resistance to GM crops, at both UK and EU level, to be abandoned immediately. According to the IOFGA [Irish Organic Farmers Association], to date GM foods have failed to deliver on all their promises and with billions of euros being invested, still this technology is rejected by people, farmers, and policy makers all over he world.

Comment from GM-free Ireland:

The UK National Beef Association (NBA) must have been hijacked by the agri-biotech industry. Their press statement was authored by NBA chairman Duff Burrell. Despite its impressive sounding name, the NBA only represents around 1,000 farmers in Britain and Northern Ireland, and many of them do not suppport GM farming. The Secretary of the Northern Ireland branch of NBA, Arthur McKevitt said he was not consulted about the statement prior to its release, and that he vehemently disagrees with Burrell's endorsement of GM crops and GM animal feed.

The NBA statement falsely stated that the former UK Chief Scientist Sir David King estimated "that the cost of the UK's failure to embrace GM crops has already cost its cereal sector £4 billion in lost output". Burrell's claim that he did so is totaly fallacious and should be withdrawn. In reality, King claimed that Britain's "failure to adopt GM crops" including lost sales for the agribiotech industry! had "cost the economy between £2bn and £4b". Critics of King accused him of being "demob-happy" and of "totalitarian paranoia". The editors of two of Britain's top scientific journals have both taken him to task, as have the environmental spokesmen of both main opposition parties. The Lancet editor Dr. Richard Horton said "King takes his faith in science into the realms of totalitarian paranoia. If he lost the debate on GM, it was because his arguments failed to convince people."

Burrell's claim that GM crops offer a solution to world hunger and that we must fast-track the approval of new untested GM animal feed is absolute nonsense. The scientific evidence now clearly shows that GM crops do NOT increase yields in the long-term (farmers who use them do so because they facilitate pest management, or because they have difficulty sourcing non-GMO seeds); an abundant supply of certified non-GMO soya meal is available from Brazil; and EU market rejection of GM food - including meat and dairy produce from livestock fed on imported GM animal feed - is increasing.

Farmers on both sides of the Irish border wishing to take advantage of the EU market for safe high quality GM-free food want feed importers to supply more, not less, GM-free feed.

The Irish Organic Farmers and Growers Association described the NBA press statement as "very short sighted" and "clearly ill-informed" (see press IOFGA press release under 11 April, below).

Commenting on the NGA statement, the chairman of Ireland's Western Organic Network, John Brennan, said: "Here we have someone supposedly representing beef farmers taking a line that we need to keep prices of beef down and continue to endorse the EU cheap food policy. Furthermore he is advocating technologies that consumers don't want to fast-track the process. What this amounts to is anti-farmer and anti-consumer sentiment and I think that Mr Burrell should seriously consider his position."

Relaxing GM laws will not lower animal feed prices in the EU
EU Parliament urged to maintain safety standards for GM food and feed

GM-free Ireland Network, 22 April 2008.

European farming organisations, consumer cooperatives, and Non Governmental Organisations representing 50 million citizens from all 27 EU member states said today that relaxing EU laws on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) would not solve the problem of animal feed cost increases which have hit the continent's livestock and dairy industries.

In a letter faxed to Members of the European Parliament [1] this morning, the coalition is urging the European Union to ensure sustainable supplies of GM-free animal feed for European farmers, and to defend the EU's "zero tolerance" policy for food and animal feed containing or derived from unapproved genetically modified organisms.

The letter was co-signed by Coordination Paysanne Européenne, EuroCoop, European Environmental Bureau, Friends of the Earth Europe, GM-free Ireland Network, Greenpeace, International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements EU Group, and the Save our Seeds Coalition.

This is the latest move in the war to control the world food supply through GM crops patented by agri-chemical-biotech corporate giants including Monsanto, BASF, Dupont/Pioneer/Dow, and Syngenta, in collusion with global commodity traders Cargill, Bunge, and Archer Daniel Midlands (ADM) which dominate the animal feed trade.

It's a war fought with crop patents, propaganda, and threats of punitive trade sanctions against European member states and other countries which refuse to vote their approval of new GMOs for animal feed, food and cultivation:

•

the crop patents enable Monsanto and few other giant companies to control 50% of the world's agricultural crops, making it illegal for farmers to save and plant their own seeds, enabling the corporations to file patent infringement lawsuits against farmers contaminated by GM seed dispersal and pollen drift, thus empowering corporate patent owners to expropriate the food supply of nations;

•

the propaganda includes false claims that GM crops do not contaminate natural crops, that they have higher yields, that they are proven to be medically and environmentally safe, that they require less toxic chemicals, and that rising animal feed costs in Europe are caused by the EU's refusal to fast-track the approval of new GM maize and soya varieties;

•

the punitive trade sanctions are being threatened - through the WTO - by the governments of the USA, Canada and Argentina: the US is currently threatening economic sanctions against the EU if it refuses to lift Austria's ban on GM crops, and has also threatened punitive import tariffs against individual EU member states unless they vote in favour of legalising new GM animal feed ingredients in the EU single market.

Some players, including the bosses of the Irish Farmers Association, seem to have swallowed the propaganda and deny the existence of certified non-GM feed. Like mice before a mousetrap, they have even become leading advocates of GM crops that would contaminate their own country in perpetuity and effectively shut them out of the growing EU market for quality meat, poultry and dairy produce from livestock fed a GM-free diet.

In response to the rising cost of animal feed, the European GM-free coalition points out that the EU is the world's most powerful trading block, and thus has the economic strength to influence what exporting countries cultivate so as to secure the safe GM-free supply chain which the majority of European farmers, food brands, retailers and consumers demand. For example, last year Brazilian soya exporters offered to ship certified non-GMO soya meal for European farmers' entire requirements in 2008, subject to EU regional coordination and forward planning. Unfortunately, some importers (including Ireland's R&H Hall) failed to act on time, raising suspicions of collusion with commodity traders like Cargill which has joint ventures with Monsanto.

On Sunday, the German Minister for Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, Horst Seehofer, accused the transnational animal feed and food corporations of being "primarily interested in maximising profits and not in provisioning people... It is not acceptable that in the U.S. there is essentially only one corporation left that supplies seed. This means farmers are blackmailed there and in the developing countries as well." Criticising the role played by market speculators and commodity traders in the rising cost of animal feed, he said "behind all that is the interest of the multinationals to sell their genetically modified soy and maize."

Tomorrow (Wednesday), a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg will debate a controversial proposal by a British MEP to "synchronise" new GMO approvals with those made in the USA (which are usually based on unverified safety claims made by the applicant companies).

The European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Affairs, Stavros Dimas, said he will oppose all further approvals of GMOs until the European Food Safety Authority has been given the capacity to carry out its legal requirements for reliable scientific risk assessments.

ENDS

Media contacts:

Michael O'Callaghan
Coordinator, GM-free Ireland Network
tel + 353 87 799 4761
email: mail@gmfreeireland.org

Raoul Bhambral
GMO and Agrofuels Campaigner, Friends of the Earth Europe
tel: + 32 2401 4808
email: raoul.bhambral@foeeurope.org
skype: raoul.bhambral

___________________

Notes to editors:

1. Letter to the Members of the European Parliament, 22 April 2008:

Dear MEP,

REF: EP Plenary Session April 23rd
Oral question: Zero tolerance regime for unauthorised GMOs and economic consequences thereof

We represent sustainable family farmers, consumer cooperatives, the organic sector and environmental NGOs from across Europe. We are writing to you concerning the oral questions, tabled by Neil Parish MEP, on the economic consequences of the EU's zero tolerance regime for unauthorised GMOs. These are due to be debated on Wednesday evening at the Strasbourg plenary. The timing of these questions coincides with high levels of media and political interest in rising food and feed prices around the world. They also follow a DG Agriculture report [1] on the potential impact of the EU's GMO regime on the availability and price of animal feed.

In the Annex (attached), we have addressed the four specific questions to be answered by the European Commission this Wednesday.

The increase in prices is a serious problem and solutions are needed urgently, but this must not be linked to unrelated issues in an attempt to force more genetically modified crops into the EU. We represent farmers and livestock breeders from around Europe who are confronted with this problem on a daily basis. We urge Members of the European Parliament to ensure that real solutions and support for farmers be investigated and implemented.

It is widely acknowledged, including by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that the primary causes of food and feed price increases are:

•

the overall increased demand;

•

poor weather conditions;

•

the rapid expansion of agrofuels (also known as biofuels);

•

the gradual deregulation of the markets over the last 20 years; and

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financial speculation.

There is little evidence to suggest that weakening the GMO regime in Europe will address this. Price increases have occurred all over the world - even in the US which has the most permissive system of GM approvals.

The roles of emerging economies, such as China, are being put forward as a reason for the EU to authorise more GMOs into the EU. Two main threats are being given for this: increased demand and the Chinese lack of awareness or lack of concern concerning GM crops.

It should however be noted that:

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Although demand in China is increasing, the FAO confirms that the EU will remain the largest single market for soybean meal for feed.

•

Secondly, China has biosafety laws in place and is much closer to the EU system in this respect than it is to the US. Concerning consumer demand, the food company Kraft, for example, has adopted a GMO-free policy for its food products on the Chinese market.

The EU, one of the world's biggest trading blocks, carries weight in the international arena and can help determine what exporting countries cultivate, including whether they go ahead with new GMOs. Argentina and Brazil are indeed cautious about approving new GM crops that could hurt their exports to the EU and we would strongly urge Member States and the European Commission to continue to push for producer countries to cultivate animal feeds that correspond to what consumers want to eat. One million European citizens signed a petition [2] in 2007 calling for the labelling of meat and dairy products from animal fed with GM crops.

On average more than half of the European public is opposed to the use of genetically modified organisms, and many EU countries in fact have higher levels of concern, reaching up to the 70-80% mark [3]. We urge you to:

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work at the EU level to develop plant protein crops in Europe with a view to becoming less dependent on animal feed imports which would be the solution to getting real GM-free animal products, in line with the wishes of the majority of consumers, and

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ensure that the EU resists pressures to weaken its GMO regulations and instead promotes and defends high health and safety standards for consumers, animals and the environment around the world.

Yours sincerely,

Gérard Choplin Coordination Paysanne Européenne (CPE)
Rosita Zilli, EuroCoop
Mauro Albrizio, European Environmental Bureau (EEB)
Helen Holder, Friends of the Earth Europe
Michael O'Callaghan, GM-free Ireland Network
Marco Contiero, Greenpeace
Marco Schlueter, International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements EU Group (IFOAM)
Benny Haerlin, Save our Seeds Coalition

Download letter

Download annex

Notes:

1.

DG Agriculture Report. Economic Impact of unapproved GMOs on EU Feed Imports and Livestock, June 2007: http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/envir/gmo/economic_impactGMOs_en.pdf

2.

http://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/press-centre/press-releases2/one-million-petition

3.

http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_295_en.pdf. Eurobarometer, March 2008.

Who we are

•

Coordination Paysanne EuropÈenne (CPE) is a coordinated group of 25 farmer's organisations from 15 countries in Europe. For 20 years we have produced analysis and proposals regarding reforms to the CAP. We are active in 15 countries and at EU level to defend the interests of small farms. With others, in 1993, we founded the international farmers and agricultural workers movement known as "la Via Campesina". CPE has been campaigning against GMOs for 15 years and also for greater autonomy within the EU concerning animal feed.

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EuroCoop is the European community of consumer cooperatives. Its Secretariat is based in Brussels. Its members are the national organisations of consumer cooperatives in 18 European countries. Created in 1957, Eurocoop today represents over 3,200 local and regional cooperatives, whose members amount to more than 25 million consumers across Europe.

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The European Environmental Bureau (EEB) is a federation of over 145 environmental organizations representing about 20 million citizens and based in all EU Member States. These organizations range from local and national, to European and international. Our aim is to protect and improve the environment of Europe and to enable the citizens of Europe to play their part in achieving that goal. The Brussels office was established in 1974 as a focal point for its members to monitor and respond to the emerging EU environmental policy. It has an information service, runs working groups of EEB members, produces position papers on topics that are, or should be, on the EU agenda, and represents the membership in discussions with the Commission, the European Parliament and the Council. It closely coordinates EU-oriented activities with its members at national level.

•

Friends of the Earth Europe (FoEE) campaigns for sustainable and just societies and for the protection of the environment, unites more than 30 national organisations around Europe with thousands of local groups. FoEE is part of the world's largest grassroots environmental network, Friends of the Earth International which has members in 70 countries worldwide with over 2 million members.

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The GM-free Ireland Network represents over one million citizens and is a coalition of 18 local authorities, 130 food and farm organisations and NGOs collaborating to keep the whole island of Ireland free of genetically modified animal feed, seeds, trees, crops, livestock, fish and food. Members include farmers, foresters, food producers, food distributors and exporters, restaurants, professional associations, doctors, economists, lawyers, journalists, chefs, students, and consumers.

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Greenpeace is an independent campaigning organisation with offices in 42 countries worldwide. Greenpeace European Unit is based in Brussels, where we monitor and analyse the work of the institutions of the EU, expose deficient EU policies and laws, and challenge decision-makers to implement progressive solutions.

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The IFOAM EU Group represents the 330 member organisations of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements in the EU 27 and EFTA countries, working on organic production. Member organisations include: consumer, farmer and processor associations; research, education and advisory organisations; certification bodies and commercial organic companies.

•

Save our Seeds is a European Coalition to protect the purity of seed. 350 organisations and over 250,000 citizens from all member states of the European Union have signed a joint petition to the European Commission to prevent the contamination of conventional and organic seeds from genetically modified varieties.

UK: Are Genetically Engineered Crops Bad?

Environmental Graffiti, 22 April 2008.

In light of the news splashed across this week's papers that the rise in food prices worldwide is forcing genetically modified foods onto the marketplace to cope with demand, one wonders why, exactly, GM foods are perceived to be so bad.

Scientifically, they haven't been proven to be. But then again, they said that about lexan, too. The reality is, you may have already been eating these foods without knowing it: in the US they are FDA-approved, and in most major grocery stores.

Proponents of GM foods claim that the environmental movement is largely motivated by anger over the profit that drives farmers and researches towards this end, and that we simply are taking out our rage without cause. These are, I imagine, the same folks that believe that global warming is a plot to bring on the world socialist government.

The reality is, that taking in vast amounts of foods that have been subject to gene splicing and irradiation may or may not be dangerous: we simply don't have enough information yet.

The fallacy my science teachers would accuse the GM advocates of using is too small a sample size. In addition, the new foods have yet to be around long enough to see how they affect a person during their entire lifetime.

The policy, then, of approving them and allowing all of humanity to act as a guinea pig is not necessarily evil so much as it is dumb: the packaging isn't required by US law to be marked, and most of us may not know the difference.

The good news, of course, is that food may cheaper - we simply don't yet know at what cost.

What can Britain do to alleviate the food crisis?

The Telegraph, Speaker's Corner, 22 April 2008.

Record food price inflation has added almost £800 to the average British family's annual shopping bill, new research reveals. The price increases suggest inflation on supermarket shelves is running at more than seven times the official rate of inflation.

The revelation comes on the same day as the World Food Programme told political leaders that rising food prices are a "silent tsunami" which threaten to be as devastating as the worst natural disasters, and that "large-scale, high-level" action is urgently needed to combat the problem.

Gordon Brown described tackling hunger as a moral challenge. He urged the international community to back an "agricultural revolution" to make sure poor farmers could sell their food and an "aid for trade" package to develop better storage and transport facilities.

What do you think Britain should do to alleviate the food crisis? Should we focus on foreign aid or on making trade more beneficial to farmers in the developing world? Should the Government take action to control food prices in Britain?

What sort of impact are the rising costs of food having on you? Are you struggling to get value for money when you go shopping?

Mark my words, this is to do with preparing the ground for GM crops. The EU and UN will talk this issue of food shortages up until we all give in to GM. Be aware that this is their game plan. Don't fall for it.

The one-world government is on its way and Blair is a big advocate. Once we go down the GM route there will be no turning back.

We must not let it happen.

WFP warns of 'silent tsunami' of hunger
Ration cards. Genetically modified crops. The end of pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap supermarkets.

Time Magazine / Associated Press, 22 April 2008. By David Stringer.

LONDON -- These possible solutions to the first global food crisis since World War II - which the World Food Program says already threatens 20 million of the poorest children - are complex and controversial. And they may not even solve the problem as demand continues to soar.

A "silent tsunami" of hunger is sweeping the world's most desperate nations, said Josette Sheeran, the WFP's executive director, speaking Tuesday at a London summit on the crisis.

The skyrocketing cost of food staples, stoked by rising fuel prices, unpredictable weather and demand from India and China, has already sparked sometimes violent protests across the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.

The price of rice has more than doubled in the last five weeks, she said. The World Bank estimates food prices have risen by 83 percent in three years. "What we are seeing now is affecting more people on every continent," Sheeran told a news conference.

Hosting talks with Sheeran, lawmakers and experts, British Prime Gordon Brown said the spiraling prices threaten to plunge millions back into poverty and reverse progress on alleviating misery in the developing world.

"Tackling hunger is a moral challenge to each of us and it is also a threat to the political and economic stability of nations," Brown said.

Malaysia's embattled prime minister is already under pressure over the price increases and has launched a major rice-growing project. Indonesia's government needed to revise its annual budget to respond.

Unrest over the food crisis has led to deaths in Cameroon and Haiti, cost Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis his job, and caused hungry textile workers to clash with police in Bangladesh.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said more protests in other developing nations appear likely. "We are going through a very serious crisis and we are going to see lots of food strikes and demonstrations," Annan told reporters in Geneva.

At streetside restaurants in Lome, Togo, even the traditional balls of corn meal or corn dough served with vegetable soup are shrinking. Once as big as a boxer's fist, the dumplings are now the size of a tennis ball - but cost twice as much.

In Yaounde, Cameroon, civil servant Samuel Ebwelle, 51, said he fears food prices will rise further.

"We are getting to the worst period of our life," he said. "We've had to reduce the number of meals we take a day from three to two. Breakfast no longer exists on our menu."

Even if her call for $500 million in emergency funding is met, food aid programs - including work to feed 20 million poor children - will be hit this year, Sheeran said.

President Bush has released $200 million in urgent aid. Britain pledged an immediate $59.7 million on Tuesday.

Even so, school feeding projects in Kenya and Cambodia have been scaled back and food aid has been cut in half in Tajikistan, Sheeran said.

Yet while angry street protesters call for immediate action, long term solutions are likely to be slow, costly and complicated, experts warn.

And evolving diets among burgeoning middle classes in India and China will help double the demand for food - particularly grain intensive meat and dairy products - by 2030, the World Bank says.

Robert Zoellick, the bank's head, claims as many as 100 million people could be forced deeper into poverty. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said rising food costs threaten to cancel strides made toward the goal of cutting world poverty in half by 2015.

"Now is not too soon to be thinking about the longer-term solutions," said Alex Evans, a former adviser to Britain's Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.

He said world leaders must help increase food production, rethink their push on biofuels - which many blame for pushing up food prices - and consider anew the once taboo topic of growing genetically modified crops.

But Evans, now a visiting fellow at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, said increasing the amount of land that can be farmed in the developing world will be arduous.

"It's almost like new oil or gas fields; they'll tend to be the hardest to reach places, that need new roads and new infrastructure to be viable," he said.

The will to increase food production exists, as does most of the necessary skills, but there are major obstacles, including a lack of government investment in agriculture and - in Africa particularly - a scarcity of fertilizers, good irrigation and access to markets.

"Many African farmers are very entrepreneurial, but they simply aren't connected to markets," said Lawrence Haddad, an economist and director of Britain's Institute of Development Studies. "They find there are no chilling plants for milk and no grinding mills for coffee."

Haddad said the likely impact of food price increases should have been anticipated. "The fact no one has previously made the link between agriculture and poverty is quite incredible," he said.

Just as new land for farming is available in Russia and Brazil, new genetically modified crops resistant to drought, or which deliver additional nutrients, could be better targeted to different regions of the developing world, Evans said. "The solutions are more nuanced than we previously thought," he added.

Sheeran said developing world governments, particularly in Africa, will need to dedicate at least 10 percent of future budgets to agriculture to boost global production.

Some experts predict other countries could follow the example of Pakistan, which has revived the use of ration cards for subsidized wheat.

The production of biofuels also needs to be urgently re-examined, Brown said.

He acknowledged that Britain this month introduced targets aimed at producing 5 percent of transport fuel from biofuels by 2010, but said his government and others should review their policies.

Production of biofuel leads to the destruction of forests and takes up land available to grow crops for food.

Brown said the impact of the food crisis won't just be felt in the developing world, but also in the checkout lane of Western supermarkets. "It it is not surprising that we see our shopping bills go up," Brown said.

Many analysts, including Britain's opposition leader David Cameron, claim that people in the West will need to eat less meat - and consume, or waste, less food in general. Some expect the shift in attitudes to herald the end of supermarket giveaways and cost-cutting grocery stores that stack goods to the ceiling and sell in bulk.

Citizens in the West, China and India must realize that the meat on their plate and biofuels in their expensive cars carry a cost for those in the developing world, Evans said.

Sheeran believes many already understand the impact. "Much of the world is waking up to the fact that food does not spontaneously appear on grocery store shelves," she said.

--- AP writers Ebow Godwin in Lome, Togo; Emmanuel Tumanjong in Yaounde, Cameroon; Anita Powell in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Eliane Engeler in Geneva contributed to this report.

Green schemes for biofuel crops set to fail - Friends of the Earth

EU Business, 22 April 2008.

Attempts to use certification schemes to reduce the widespread environmental and social problems caused by growing crops for fuels and animal feeds are bound to fail, states a new report released today by Friends of the Earth groups.

The report is released on the eve of a controversial April 23-24 meeting in Buenos Aires set to discuss the certification of growing soy, a crop expanding rapidly to meet the increasing demand for fuel and the world's most-used animal feed. Ý

The report from Friends of the Earth groups comes amid global worries about the increasingly tragic impacts of rising food prices. Biofuels - plants grown to make fuel not food - have been blamed as one factor driving this trend. Ý

Where they are grown in intensive agricultural systems, such as environmentally-damaging large-scale monoculture plantations, biofuels are called agrofuels. Their spread is creating even more pressure on land and further exacerbates existing problems.

"The expansion of massive monocultures leads to the destruction of our forests, savannahs and wildlife, raises land and food prices and directly impacts on rural communities who are forced off their land to make way for the plantations. Unfortunately certifying large monocultures as sustainable would mislead international consumers and not improve production methods. Increasing production for export, and increasing consumption in the North, are destructive trends that must be reversed," said Lucia Ortiz of Friends of the Earth Brazil. Ý

"Whilst we feed cars and factory farms with cheap crops from the South, food prices rocket, forests are destroyed and people suffer. Certifying these crops as green, even if well intentioned, is a smokescreen that will fool the public and let the problems continue. The really green answer is to reduce the demand for these crops in the first place," said Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth Europe. Ý

The report investigates all the major certification schemes being introduced to minimise the environmental and social problems from growing soy and sugar cane in Latin America and concludes that:

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the rapid expansion of soy and sugar cane plantations pushes out other farming elsewhere causing deforestation, loss of wildlife and huge social problems, including violent conflicts and forced land evictions. All certification schemes fail to solve this major problem.

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knock-on effects such as rising food prices fall outside of all proposed certification schemes.

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it is highly unlikely that any of the certification schemes will be fully implemented and effectively monitored, thereby introducing considerable risk that schemes will be open to fraud and consumers will be deceived.

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many certification schemes are heavily dominated by large international companies that make their business from selling more and more commodity crops and have little interest in reducing the demand. This has led to widespread rejection from civil society groups in Latin America.

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genetically modified crops are accepted in some schemes as 'responsible' or as a mark of sustainability even where their use has led to a massive increase in chemical herbicides, environmental degradation and health problems for rural communities.

Friends of the Earth International also released a separate statement coinciding with the Buenos Aires meeting of the so-called Roundtable on Responsible Soy due to take place on April 23-24 in Buenos Aires. The Roundtable was widely criticised in the statement. Ý

"The companies involved in the Roundtable on Responsible Soy are in a unique position: they control both demand and supply of cheap soy for feed and fuel. But the only solution to the massive problems caused by industrial soy production is to decrease soy production and consumption, which is exactly the opposite of what the companies involved aim at," said Roque Pedace from Friends of the Earth Argentina.

Recent studies including a Friends of the Earth report show that there are also grave environmental and social problems with palm oil, which is widely used in food, feed and agrofuels. The bulk of its production originates in unsustainable oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Friends of the Earth Europe campaigns for sustainable and just societies and for the protection of the environment, unites more than 30 national organisations with thousands of local groups and is part of the world's largest grassroots environmental network, Friends of the Earth International.

USA: Please, sir, I want some GMOs
Worldwide resistance to GMOs dwindle as food bills rise

Grist magazine, 22 April 2008. By Tom Philpott.

For a while now, I've been cautioning people that surging prices for industrial food don't necessarily "level the playing field" for sustainably produced fare. In fact, the few giant companies that dominate the global food system are fattening themselves on higher prices, consolidating their grip over the world's palate. Last week, new Gristmill blogger Anna Lappe showed that Cargill -- a major producer of everything from fertilizer to biofuel to meat -- recently reported an 86 percent jump in quarterly earnings.

And Monday, Andrew Pollack of The New York Times reported that sky-high prices are breaking down global resistance to GMO crops. Writes Pollack:

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies, and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops.

That's mainly because the countries that now dominate world grain production -- the United States, Brazil, and Argentina -- have all completely thrown their lots with GMOs. The United States alone produces 44 percent of the world's corn -- and 70 percent of global corn exports originate from here.

Thus, if you're going to buy corn and soy on world markets, you're either going to buy GMOs, or pony up a hefty premium to avoid them. One South Korean food processor told Pollack that "non-engineered corn cost Korean millers about $450 a metric ton, up from $143 in 2006. Genetically engineered corn costs about $350 a ton." That makes a nearly 30 percent markup for non-GMO corn, with GMO corn already trading at record highs.

Not surprisingly, with prices surging, fewer countries are willing to pay that premium. Pollack reports that food processors in Japan and South Korea, which have until now rejected GMOs for fear of consumer backlash, are now quietly phasing them in.

In Europe, consumers remain highly skeptical of the alleged benefits of GMOs. Here is Pollack:

Polls in Europe do not yet show a decisive shift in consumer sentiment, and the industry has had some recent setbacks. Since the beginning of the year, France has banned the planting of genetically modified corn while Germany has enacted a law allowing for foods to be labeled as "G.M. free."

Yet as prices rise, that may change:

The chairman of the European Parliament's agriculture committee, Neil Parish, said that as prices rise, Europeans "may be more realistic" about genetically modified crops: "Their hearts may be on the left, but their pockets are on the right."

Thus, the allegedly free market -- shamelessly rigged by U.S. and European biofuel mandates, which are jacking up the price of corn and soy -- overwhelms consumer desire.

Hungary: Earth Day - Greens mount campaign tour to expand GMO-free zones

Budapest Times, 22 April 2008.

Green groups embarked on a tour of Hungary on Tuesday to warn of the dangers of genetically-modified products (GMO) and campaign for more GMO-free zones.

During their weekly programme, the Hungarian Environmentalists' Association (MTVSZ) and the Green Group for Central Hungary will aim at drawing support from farmers to preserve their GMO-free zones and add new ones.

The groups will collect signatures in central Budapest on Tuesday, marking Earth Day.

So far 74 towns and villages all over the country have joined the GMO-free initiative, pledging to exclude such products from their crops.

Hungary has started assessing the risks of GMO farming in response to pressure from the European Union.

Hungary's farm minister has also argued that competition from neighbouring countries may force farmers to weigh the benefits of GMO-free produce against cheaper production costs.

Hungary is among the biggest grain producers in the 27-member European Union and was the first country in eastern Europe to ban GMO crops or foods.

GMOs back on the agenda: Canada's bill C-617

Celsias.com, 22 April 2008.

Editor's Note: Today we take pleasure in welcoming Lauren Carter to the writing team. Lauren lives in Ontario, Canada, has a wealth of writing experience and will be covering such issues as food, energy efficiency, sustainable travel and more.

If Canadian consumers have their way, Monsanto might have the short end of the straw this spring as Canadian politicians revisit an old debate.

By the luck of the draw, Bill C-517, calling for mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods in Canada, is currently being considered in Parliament. The latest of several bills introduced into the House of Commons over the years, this latest plea for Canada to join other countries in the push against GMO foods remains a tender sprout that could still be mowed down.

Despite several polls showing that the majority of Canadians want to know what they're eating, the government has so far refused to legislate labeling laws that would provide this information.

"Consumers and Canadians are very interested in food labeling and the importance of food labeling as it relates to information that helps them make their choices about food," admits Member of Parliament Bruce Stanton, during a recording of the debate on the show Deconstructing Dinner, on Kootenay Co-Op Radio. But, insists Stanton in a follow-up interview on the show, Health Canada is sufficient to the task of ensuring that foods available to consumers are safe.

As the bill awaits another reading and a vote, several groups such as Greenpeace Canada and the Vancouver, B.C. publication The Tyee, are attempting to get the word out. But as they preach to the converted, many Canadians who have yet to be introduced to the subject will have to wait awhile. It seems the mainstream media ‚ including Canada's own Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ‚ have yet to even mention this latest effort to allow us to make up our own minds about what we eat.

For those Canadians who would rather avoid GMO foods in our supermarkets, download a copy of Greenpeace's How to Avoid Genetically Engineered Foods. And as the vote on this bill is still to come, make time to write your M.P.

Further Reading:

•

Calling Five Percent of U.S. Residents to Action on GMOs http://www.celsias.com/2008/04/13/calling-five-percent-of-us-residents-to-action-on-gmos/

•

The World According to Monsanto http://www.celsias.com/2008/04/09/the-world-according-to-monsanto/

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Maine in Quandary Over GM Crops http://www.celsias.com/2008/04/09/maine-in-quandary-over-gm-crops/

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The Global Spread of GMO Crops http://www.celsias.com/2008/03/25/the-global-spread-of-gmo-crops/

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GM Crops, Pesticides, and the Poor http://www.celsias.com/2008/02/14/gm-crops-pesticides-and-the-poor/

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Carbon Credits Used to Fund GMOs? http://www.celsias.com/2008/01/09/carbon-credits-used-to-fund-gmos/

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The Food Revolution - Genetic Engineering, Part I http://www.celsias.com/2007/12/01/the-food-revolution-genetic-engineering-part-i/

•

The Health Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods http://www.celsias.com/2007/04/20/the-health-dangers-of-genetically-modified-foods/

View Celsias projects related to this topic >> http://www.celsias.com/projects

Poland's meat crisis

PigProgress.net, April 21, 2008

Polish meat has already become more expensive compared to Western Europe. Ý

However, the situation may be reversed if the Polish parliament agrees to GMO feed and if Poland follows the same path as Denmark. Ý

During 2007, the amount of imports exceeded exports. This was mainly due to high pork prices in Poland.Ý According to Dariusz Nowakowski, CEO of Grupa Animex, Poland's biggest meat processor, the situation may get even worse this year.

Much higher prices compared to EU

Nowakowski says, "85% of production costs are generated by meat prices. In Poland, the price of pork has for a long time already been higher than the EU average and much higher than in Denmark, the USA or Brazil."

Most likely, higher production costs will have to be dealt with as well, when a ban of GMO elements in feed is implemented in August this year.

"This is a big threat to our company and to the whole sector in Poland. If this provision comes into force, meat prices will soon jump and imports will further grow," said Nowakowski.

The Minister of Agriculture, Marek Sawicki, has promised to levy this ban.

Denmark a good example

Nowakowski added that, "Polish meat would become more competitive and that prices would fall substantially if the sector followed the suit of Denmark, which has become a giant in pork production and exports in the last thirty years."

Comment from GM-free Ireland

Poland supplies GM-free pig meat to Germany, much of it for the huge sausage market there. The German market for Polish meat is expected to expand further in May when German retailers begin GM-free meat labelling for meat from pigs fed on a certified non-GMO diet, boosting income for Polish farmers in the 43 European Regions which have adopted a quality food strategy, as well as in major European retailers who are moving towards a GM-free food chain in response to consumer demand for safe quality food.

Egypt approves first Bt-corn variety for domestic planting

WorldGrain.com, 22 April 2008.

CAIRO -- The Egyptian Minister of Agriculture recently approved decisions made by the National Biosafety Committee (NBC) and Seed Registration Committee allowing for commercialization of a genetically modified Bt corn variety. The decision marks the first genetically modified crop approved for domestic planting in Egypt.

During last year's growing season, the field trials were conducted and assessed. A local seed company, acting as an agent of a multi-national life science company, originally submitted the request and accompanying dossier several years ago. The company plans to import seed both for propagation and production from South Africa. The company plans to cultivate the BT corn in 10 governates throughout Egypt and has already started a campaign to market the seed to producers and extension agents

21 April 2008

Ireland: Sargent opens TCD food week

Ireland.com, 21 April 2008. By Elaine Edwards.

Raising awareness of the global food emergency is central to the Green agenda, Minister of State for Food and Horticulture Trevor Sargent said today.

Mr Sargent was speaking as he formally opened Trinity College Dublin's first ever food week. "Raising awareness of food issues, from sourcing local food and ensuring global food security to protecting farmers and consumers against risks associated with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), are a vital part of the Green agenda," Mr Sargent said.

"This event comes at a time when food has never been a more central issue and when the global challenges are more acute that ever before."

Mr Sargent will speak at the college tomorrow on the topic of GMOs, which his party wants to see banned in Ireland.

The World Food Programme (WFP), a UN body, recently described rising food and fuel prices as "nothing less than a global emergency".

Rising prices mean the world's poorest people will have to spend a larger portion of their income on food, the WFP says. This may mean they will buy less food, or food that is less nutritious, or they may have to rely on outside help.

At the end of February, the body estimated it would need an additional $500 million on top of its base budget to cover the increased cost of food and fuel in poorer countries.

But because of rapidly rising prices, it now puts that figure at $755 million and says that may rise even further.

The TCD food week will feature an organic mini-market on the front square of the college on Wednesday and Thursday. Campus restaurants will feature special healthy menus devised in conjunction with chef Darina Allen.

EU may delay decision in May on growing GM crops

Reuters, 21 April 2008. By Jeremy Smith.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission may again put off a decision on whether farmers can grow more genetically modified crops when it holds a long-awaited biotech policy debate in May, officials said on Monday.

After months of expectation, the Commission has finally set May 7 for debating its biotech policy, centered around what has been called the "Dimas package": EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, one of the most GMO-wary commissioners.

Cultivation of GM crops is expected to be at the top of the agenda, with three applications long overdue for consideration, one lawsuit filed against the Commission and another threatened. The EU has not approved any GM crops for growing since 1998.

Another big problem is Austria, the only remaining country cited in a World Trade Organisation case filed against the Commission by Argentina, Canada and the United States to maintain bans, from 1997 and 1999, against two GM crop products.

Officials said one possible deal being discussed in Brussels was for Dimas to agree to an order for Austria to lift its ban on import and processing of those products, but keep its ban on cultivation. In return, his wish to reject two company applications for growing GM crops would not be blocked.

"The idea would be for Dimas to give this and allow the College (the EU's 27 commissioners) to decide on the two maizes," one EU official said.

"(It) would have to go against the proposal of a commissioner (to block the GM maize applications). Several member states have also come out explicitly against (GM crop) cultivation," the official said.

Those maizes are Syngenta's Bt-11; and 1507 maize, developed by Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a unit of DuPont Co, and Dow AgroSciences unit Mycogen Seeds.

Last year, Pioneer filed a lawsuit against the Commission for what it called undue delays in processing its request for EU approval of 1507 maize. And last week, German chemicals company BASF threatened to do the same over its biotech potato, which it wants EU farmers to grow to make extra starch.

For months, the Commission has been due to debate the issue in a bid to end a policy vacuum and also show its major trading partners like the United States, the world's top biotech crop grower, that Europe is, to a point, in the market for GMOs.

Europe has long been split on biotech policy and the EU's 27 countries consistently clash over whether to approve new, finished GM varieties for import. The Commission usually ends up issuing a rubberstamp approval, which it may do under EU law.

(Editing by Peter Blackburn)

UK: NFU still backs GM crops despite latest study in US

The Journal (nebusiness.co.uk), 21 April 2008. By Sam Wood.

THE National Farmers' Union has said it still backs genetically modified crops despite the results of study conducted in the US that has shown that genetic modification can reduce productivity.

The investigation, which has been carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas, found that GM soya produces about 10% less food than a non-genetically modified crop.

Professor Barney Gordon, from the university's department of Agronomy, said he started the research because many farmers who switched to the GM crop has noticed that yields were not as high as expected in optimal conditions.

He said: "People were asking the question 'how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?'"

Prof Gordon grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field.

The GM crop produced 10% less - 70 bushels of grain per acre - than the non-GM one which produced 77 bushels per acre.

The GM crop, which had been designed to be resistant to the weedkiller Roundup, only recovered to the level of the conventional crop when extra manganese was added to the soil.

This suggests that the modification hindered the crop's take up of this essential element from the soil. The study backs up earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 11% less than the best non-GM soya available.

It has been suggested the process of modification decreases productivity and that while GM versions are being developed better conventional ones become available.

Despite the findings a spokesman for the National Farmers' Union said GM crops still had an important part to play in reducing the world food crisis.

The spokesman said: "GM technology has a lot to offer in terms of allowing increased yields without the need for increased use of land or fertiliser. But we've got to be led by our customers because there is no point producing things that they're not happy with.

"If GM soya doesn't cut the mustard in terms of increased yields then farmers won't grow it."

Monsanto said it was surprised by the extent of the decline in crop but not by the fact that yields had dropped. It said the soya had not been engineered to increase yields and it was now developing one that would.

Last week the biggest study of its kind, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, concluded GM would not provide a solution to world hunger.

Some believe that the physiology of plants is now reaching the limits of productivity which can be achieved.

UK: If this meat was from a cloned animal, would you eat it?

The Guardian, 21 April 2008. By Ed Pilkington.

Cloned animals and their offspring have been declared safe to eat; in a matter of months their meat will be on sale in the US. Ed Pilkington reports on a PR timebomb that's about to blow

It is an absurdly pretty setting. A row of conifers borders snowbound fields that stretch for miles to a low horizon. Birds are nesting. Magnificent Angus cattle meander under a metallic blue sky, with the sweet smell of silage hanging over everything.

A sign nailed to one of the cattle pens provides the first clue that this picture postcard view is not as quaintly old-fashioned as it looks: "For Biosecurity: Authorised Personnel Only." The second clue comes in the form of two young red Holstein heifers, identified by eartags as numbers 306 and 307, sitting quietly on a bed of straw. By their perfect bone structure and proportions, a breeder could tell that these are very fine animals; to me they are just absurdly pretty, like their surroundings. Their fluffy rust-red-and-white coats and pink wet noses are programmed to make you smile involuntarily. Then you notice that they are the spitting image of each other, the same white blazes running down their foreheads and the same doe-like eyes.

These are not twins, though they do have identical genetic makeup. They were created from separate embryos containing the DNA extracted from a prize-winning red Holstein cow, Miss Leader Red Rose. In short, 306 and 307 are clones.

It seems incongruous, but these two innocent-looking calves are at the centre of a public relations timebomb that is about to blow, with consequences that will be felt throughout Europe and beyond. Along with about 50 other cloned animals being held in a "biosecure" environment here at Bovance, America's largest cow-cloning company in Sioux Center, Iowa, they embody the frontline in the battle between science and consumer ethics over the way we produce food, similar in many respects to the furore that erupted over genetically modified crops.

Twelve years after the birth of the Scottish trailblazer Dolly the sheep, cloned animals are about to be cleared for use in commercial farming. Earlier this year, food regulatory authorities in America and Europe declared meat and milk derived from cloned cattle and their progeny safe to eat and drink. The same green light was given for cloned pigs and goats.

As a result, the US Food and Drug Administration has now lifted a voluntary ban on the sale of cloned food that has been in place since 1999. Farmers can freely sell the meat and milk from the offspring of cloned animals, a liberty that has already led to a sharp spike in interest in Bovance's services from breeders across the US. And where America leads, others are ever quick to follow.

Only one final regulatory barrier stands in the way of firms such as Bovance seeking to inject cloning technology into commercial farming. The US agricultural department has asked for a brief extension of the ban - applicable to cloned animals alone, not their progeny - to give it time to talk to international trade partners and retailers in the hope of avoiding a consumer backlash. No one expects that hurdle to be in place for more than a few months, after which the path will be clear for the full exploitation of cloned animals for food. As Joseph Mendelson of the Centre for Food Safety puts it: "It seems to us that the floodgates are already open."

The scientists and entrepreneurs who are pushing at the frontiers of this new technology dislike the phrase cloned food, finding it too reminiscent perhaps of the scarewords used by opponents to GM crops such as "Frankenfood". They prefer the phrase "agricultural genomics". But putting the obfuscations of vocabulary aside, the promise they see in cloning is quite simply stated.

In essence, cloning allows breeders to speed up the clock - to bring forward a particular trait in a herd in rapid time. Let's say a farmer discovers that one of his bulls is exceptional for its muscle development and hence meat production. The farmer wants to spread those traits right through his stock. He can put the bull to several cows each year for natural procreation, but the impact is limited by the breeding season and the dilution of the bull's DNA as it combines with the cows' inferior genetic profiles. Artificial insemination can be used to raise the number of fertilisations possible from a single elite bull, as it often is in dairy herds. But cloning has the added advantage that the animal's genetic brilliance is passed in its unaltered glory, which amplifies its effect in raising the genetic quality and hence the value of the herd. In genetic terms, cloning is to previous reproductive methods as the Blitzkrieg was to the cavalry charge.

David Faber, the head of Trans Ova Genetics, a firm in Iowa that jointly set up Bovance, says the method increases the impact of elite farm animals. "We are interested in reproducing animals that are at the peak of the genetic pyramid - they are the rock stars of the barnyard."

To see where this process of rock-star proliferation begins, I fly 1,000 miles across the Great Plains, out of the snows of Iowa and into the heat of Austin, Texas. There, in a business park on the edge of town with neatly trimmed lawns and sparkling glass buildings, I am greeted by a vision of farming's future. This is the headquarters of Viagen, Trans Ova's partner in Bovance and one of only three companies in America leading the global push towards farm cloning. (The other is Cyagra, an Argentinian-owned company based in Pennsylvania.) Whatever critics might say about this technology, no one can accuse Viagen of lacking a sense of humour. A poster of cowboys on the wall bears the appeal "Wanted: Progressive cattlemen." Another says: "Cloning is cool cool."

I watch Viagen's laboratory technicians carry out the various stages of cattle cloning. Tissue samples from the ears of rock-star bulls and cows from across rural America are sent to the company in temperature-controlled boxes, then chopped and placed into incubators to allow their cells to multiply before being cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen.

In another lab, Earl Hwang is displaying his great skill at working under a microscope - a 21st-century equivalent of a cowboy's dexterity with the lasso. He begins by emptying receptor eggs of their genetic content, using UV light to detect the tiny balls of DNA and suck them into a microscopic pipette. Then he inserts a single cell drawn from the tissue sample of the animal to be cloned into the genetically void egg and sets it down between the egg's outer wall and inner cytoplasm. The final stage is to pass an electric current through the egg that fuses the walls of the cells and mimics the process of fertilisation. The result: an embryo carrying the exact genetic match of its single parent. It was two such embryos created in Viagen's Texan lab that ended up as 306 and 307.

Mark Walton, Viagen's president, is unapologetic about his desire, as head of a for-profit company, to make money out of cloned farm animals. He puts the firm's investment so far at "multiple tens of millions of dollars", though he admits that, to date, the payback has been very limited. The voluntary ban placed on the cloning industry has until now demoted the use of the technology to the ranks of a minority sport. While 33 million beef cattle are slaughtered in America each year, the country only has 570 cloned cattle - and 10 cloned horses, eight pigs, five African wildcats, three mules and a cloned sand cat.

But Walton is confident that the lean years are coming to an end. His order book is full for the rest of the year, and once the final barrier is lifted he thinks demand will flow. "The genetics from cloned animals could certainly spread pretty broadly and pretty quickly once the market opens and is accepted."

Walton believes the value of cloning is not just economic - to boost the performance of animals and thus their value. He also claims that the technology has a definite green potential in that it can increase the food efficiency of the herd, by bringing to the fore animals who require less feeding and produce less waste, thus reducing their environmental footprint.

More radically, he cites scientists in Canada who have created an "enviro pig" by inserting the gene phytase into its genome, which makes the pig excrete less phosphate - a major agricultural pollutant. The enviro pig came about through gene manipulation, but if combined with cloning, its green potential could be maximised. Walton gives another example from New Zealand: "A dairy cow was discovered by accident that naturally produces lower-fat milk that has some omega-3 fatty acids in it. Wow, that's really cool.But what can you do with just one cow? With cloning you could make something of it."

What he doesn't expect to see is cloned beefburgers landing on American dinner plates any time soon. At $17,000 (£8,500) a cloned calf, compared with $1,500 for a naturally conceived animal, it would be far too expensive to replicate the rock stars of the farmyard only to butcher them. Milk is likely to be a different story, as even elite cloned cows need milking. And the offspring of cloned animals are certain to enter the US food chain soon, and in rapidly growing numbers.

In fact, they already have. Don Coover in Kansas has been selling up to 20,000 units of sperm from each of his two cloned bulls every year for several years. "That's thousands and thousands of cloned progeny. A lot of people, myself included, got impatient with the regulators for dragging their feet and we chose not to abide by the voluntary moratorium," he says.

Coover's trade in the sperm of cloned bulls suggests that the ban has already begun to break down, and that in turn has set alarm bells ringing among a powerful alliance of consumer groups, churches, animal welfare and other bodies that are staunchly against the advent of the new technology.

The Centre for Food Safety, a leading opponent, bases its position on a range of detailed scientific criticisms combined with wider ethical objections. It points out that the failure rate of cloning is still substantially higher than other reproductive methods - it can be as low as 5% of the embryos implanted. There is also a greater incidence of problems at birth, such as Large Offspring Syndrome, in which oversized foetuses develop in the womb that can cause suffering and even death for both mother and calf.

CFS is unimpressed by official assurances that cloned food is safe, arguing that there is insufficient scientific evidence to be certain about its long-term prospects. The organisation poses a series of what-if questions: what if defects or mutations in clones remain hidden and undetectable but are found to be dangerous to humans down the line? What if those defects can be passed on to the progeny of clones, thereby disseminating them throughout the nation's livestock?

And finally CFS warns that the impact of cloning will tend towards a further reduction in biodiversity through the promotion of genetically identical herds, which in turn could put both animals and humans at risk of disease epidemics. It wants to see the labelling of any products coming from either clones or their offspring, a demand that US authorities have deflected.

Viagen has an answer to each of these forebodings. The success rate of cloning is improving all the time, bringing down costs and ameliorating animal suffering. The progeny of clones are not clones at all, but normal animals created from two parents; and any irregularities in the expression of cloned genes are ironed out, or "reset", in their offspring. As for the string of what-if questions, Walton dismisses that as scaremongering: "That is applying the precautionary principle, and the fallacy of that, as any beginners' statistics class will teach you, is that it is impossible to prove a negative. As a scientist, I absolutely reject it."

With such arguments swirling back and forth, the reaction of the big supermarkets that could so easily be caught in the middle has so far been understandably cautious. Wal-Mart, the world's largest supermarket chain, says, somewhat ambiguously, that it has no plans to buy products from cloned livestock. The second largest US chain, Kroger, is more categorical, pledging to shun products from clones or their offspring.

As for the great American public, confusion reigns. Surveys suggest that knowledge levels are pitifully low, while suspicions abound about a technique that many regard as weird or unnatural. A poll last December by the Washington-based Pew Initiative found that despite the overwhelming conclusion from scientists that cloning poses no safety risks to humans, two-thirds of Americans remained "uncomfortable" with the idea.

You get a feel for what beef means to the average American when you visit a famous old Texan barbeque shack, Iron Works, in the centre of Austin. There they serve beef ribs that look as though they have been carved from giants. The gargantuan cuts are dripping in BBQ sauce with meat that is so succulent and tender that it really does melt in the mouth.

At a table at the back, Cynthia (she asked not to give her surname) is just finishing off her plate, and as she does so she tells me her views, which touch on several of those wider public apprehensions. She is reserving judgment on cloned food because she doesn't know enough about it, she says, but then she goes on to reveal that she fears it will lead to less genetic diversity and a downward spiral. "We are sterilising the Earth and that's very dangerous. Mother nature has been taking care of reproduction for thousands of years, so why do it? I can understand if it's to find a cure for an illness, but to create these huge slabs of meat?"

If the GM crop row is anything to go by, the consumer reaction in Britain is likely to be considerably more hostile even than in the US. Last month the first public auction in the UK of the progeny of a cloned cow had to be cancelled in the face of protests. Dundee Paradise - the offspring of a Holstein clone called Vandyk-K Integ Paradise 2 - was withdrawn from sale, although the auction was fully legal under EU law.

Bob Schauf, a Wisconsin dairy farmer who owns a cloned cow called Mandy2, has firsthand experience of the British aversion. He made a business plan with a partner in the UK to sell eggs flushed from a cloned cow for artificial insemination. But his partner called him to say the deal was off. "He sounded like a puppy that had just been spanked," Schauf recalls. "He said that the UK didn't want the cloned cow over there; nobody wants any of this. He was very disappointed."

Sir Ian Wilmut, who fronted the team that cloned Dolly the sheep, thinks that Britain's strong emphasis on animal welfare will prove a formidable hurdle for the cloning industry. The high incidence of problems at birth with cloned animals is likely to turn consumers off. "It wouldn't be deemed acceptable to produce elite animals whose benefit over the rest of the herd were small and the risks of their creation large," he says.

But it is by no means certain that the gradual dissemination of genetic material produced by cloning can be prevented, or even monitored. Though Viagen is proposing a database to record the whereabouts of all its cloned farm animals, neither it nor anybody else is contemplating tracking what happens to the offspring - a task that would be prohibitively expensive, were it even possible.

GM crops had a similar trajectory. Transgenic crops - that is those whose makeup has been altered through the transfer of genes from other breeds - have now spread through the US like a spider's web. About 90% of the soya bean crop and 80% of corn is now transgenic, while about a half of all cheese consumed is made with enzymes produced by genetically modified bacteria. Those are statistics that give Viagen's Walton added hope that consumer resistance to cloning will now similarly be overcome: "There's not a consumer in America today who doesn't end up buying some transgenic food," he says. "So the fact is that what people tell you in the polls and what they actually do in the supermarket are two very different things".

How cattle are cloned

1 Cells from the ears of rock-star bulls and cows are placed under a microscope at ViaGen's offices in Austin, Texas

2 The tiny balls of DNA are detected using UV light

3 The DNA is removed from the nucleus of the cell using a microscopic pipette

4 Cloned cells are stored

5 Embryos created from the cloned cells are frozen at Bovance in Iowa

6 A cow is placed in a stall to receive a cloned embryo

7 The embryo is implanted

8 The result - cloned heifers

Companies urged to 'green' their supply chain

Food Navigator.com, 21 April 2008. By Chris Jones.

Firms should look at measures to make their supply chains 'greener' not only because it is seen as 'doing the right thing' but because it is also the 'right thing to do', a new study suggests. Management and technology consultants Diamond suggest that introducing environmentally friendly and ethical practices into the supply chain is not only good for improving a company's image: it also improves operations and reduces costs.

Diamond analysts Mark Baum and Darin Yug said that green supply chain initiatives have moved rapidly from merely compliance with environmental regulation towards a means of effecting real cost savings in areas such as energy conservation or recycling.

They quote examples from the food and beverage industry to highlight their point: NestlÈ's sustainability programme helped the Swiss group make packaging material savings of $510m between 1991 and 2006, while Heineken's Aware of Energy project was expected to lead to energy cost reductions of around 15 per cent by 2010.

Baum and Yug say that companies wanting to follow suit must be careful to have an integrated strategy for greening their supply chain and not merely attempt to 'patch' a solution onto an existing strategy.

"The key to extracting business value lies in establishing a long-term green strategy that is aligned with corporate strategy and approached top-down," the analysts write.

But they warn that management should not focus entirely on the business gains to be made from greener supply chains.

"Not every initiative will have a positive return on investment. Therefore, it is essential to think about all the green initiatives together as a balanced portfolio, with some initiatives being done on an investment basis."

Key to a successful transformation of the supply chain is leadership, the analysts note.

"Most companies face an uphill battle when implementing green initiatives because these efforts are typically managed in isolation by a firm's environmental health and safety team."

Instead, Baum and Yug say that companies should create a "governance council" that would coordinate efforts across all company divisions and departments, from supply chain and operations to marketing and sales.

"Corporate communications should also be linked with the sustainability initiatives to ensure that the impact of the initiative is being communicated to customers, shareholders and the general public," they add.

Any plans to move towards a greener supply chain must also be implemented gradually, the analysts say, since wholesale change in one fell swoop would prove ruinously costly.

"Greening is best accomplished in small steps: for example, green initiatives can start in areas that have the greatest business and environmental impact and companies can look forward to quick wins before moving forward."

In lean times, biotech grains are less taboo

International Herald Tribune, 21 April 2008. By Andrew Pollack.

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops. In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods. Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn. But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky.

"We cannot afford it," said a corn buyer at Kato Kagaku, a Japanese maker of corn starch and corn syrup.

In the United States, wheat growers and marketers, once hesitant about adopting biotechnology because they feared losing export sales, are now warming to it as a way to bolster supplies.

Genetically modified crops contain genes from other organisms to make the plants resistance to insects, herbicides or disease. Opponents continue to worry that such crops have not been studied enough and that they might pose risks to health and the environment.

"I think it's pretty clear that price and supply concerns have people thinking a little bit differently today," said Steve Mercer, a spokesman for U.S. Wheat Associates, a federally supported cooperative that promotes American wheat abroad.

The group, which once cautioned farmers about growing biotech wheat, is working to get seed companies to restart development of genetically modified wheat and to get foreign buyers to accept it.

Even in Europe, where opposition to what the Europeans call Frankenfoods has been fiercest, some prominent government officials and business executives are calling for faster approvals of imports of genetically modified crops. They are responding in part to complaints from livestock producers, who say they might suffer a critical shortage of feed if imports are not accelerated.

In Britain, the National Beef Association, which represents cattle farmers, issued a statement this month demanding that "all resistance" to such crops "be abandoned immediately in response to shifts in world demand for food, the growing danger of global food shortages and the prospect of declining domestic animal production."

The chairman of the European Parliament's agriculture committee, Neil Parish, said that as prices rise, Europeans "may be more realistic" about genetically modified crops: "Their hearts may be on the left, but their pockets are on the right."

With food riots in some countries focusing attention on how the world will feed itself, biotechnology proponents see their chance. They argue that while genetic engineering might have been deemed unnecessary when food was abundant, it will be essential for helping the world cope with the demand for food and biofuels in the decades ahead.

Through gene splicing, the modified crops now grown ó mainly canola, corn, cotton and soybeans ó typically contain bacterial genes that help the plants resist insects or tolerate a herbicide that can be sprayed to kill weeds while leaving the crop unscathed. Biotechnology companies are also working on crops that might need less water or fertilizer, which could have a bigger impact on improving yield.

Certainly any new receptivity to genetically modified crops would be a boon to American exporters. The United States accounted for half the world's acreage of biotech crops last year.

But substantial amounts of corn, soy or canola are grown in Argentina, Brazil and Canada. China has developed insect-resistant rice that is awaiting regulatory approval in that country.

The pressure to re-evaluate biotech comes as prices of some staples like rice and wheat have doubled in the last few months, provoking violent protests in several countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti and Thailand. Factors behind the price spikes include the diversion of crops to make biofuel, rising energy prices, growing prosperity in India and China, and droughts in some regions ó including Australia, a major grain producer.

Biotechnology still certainly faces obstacles. Polls in Europe do not yet show a decisive shift in consumer sentiment, and the industry has had some recent setbacks. Since the beginning of the year France has banned the planting of genetically modified corn while Germany has enacted a law allowing for foods to be labeled as "GM free."

And a new international assessment of the future of agriculture, released last Tuesday, gave such tepid support to the role genetic engineering could play in easing hunger that biotechnology industry representatives withdrew from the project in protest. The report was a collaboration of more than 60 governments, with participation from companies and nonprofit groups, under the auspices of the World Bank and the United Nations.

Hans Herren, co-chairman of the project, said providing more fertilizer to Africa would improve output much more than genetic engineering could. "What farmers really are struggling with are water issues, soil fertility issues and market access for their products," he said.

Opponents of biotechnology say they see not so much an opportunity as opportunism by its proponents to exploit the food crisis. "Where politicians and technocrats have always wanted to push GMO's, they are jumping on this bandwagon and using this as an excuse," said Helen Holder, who coordinates the campaign against biotech foods for Friends of the Earth Europe. GMO refers to genetically modified organism.

Even Michael Mack, the chief executive of the Swiss company Syngenta, an agricultural chemical and biotechnology giant, cautioned that the industry should not use the current crisis to push its agenda.

Whatever importance biotechnology can play in the long run, food shortages are making it harder for some buyers to avoid engineered crops.

The main reason some Japanese and South Korean makers of corn starch and corn sweeteners are buying biotech corn is that they have dwindling alternatives. Their main supplier is the United States, where 75 percent of corn grown last year was genetically modified, up from 40 percent in 2003. "We cannot get hold of non-GM corn nowadays," said Yoon Chang-gyu, director of the Korean Corn Processing Industry Association.

But the tightening global supply has made it harder to get nonengineered corn from elsewhere. And as corn prices soar, millers and food companies are less able to pay the surcharge to keep nonengineered corn separate from biotech varieties. The surcharge itself has been rising. Yoon said non-engineered corn cost Korean millers about $450 a metric ton, up from $143 in 2006. Genetically engineered corn costs about $350 a ton.

In Europe, livestock producers say that regulations on genetically modified crops could choke feed supplies at a time when they are already reeling from higher prices. Even after a new genetically engineered variety is approved for growing in the United States, it might take several years for Europe to approve it for import.

Moreover, European rules require an entire shipment of grain to be turned back if it contains even a trace of an unapproved variety. Such a problem last year disrupted exports of corn gluten, a feed product, from the United States to Europe.

Feed makers and livestock producers want faster approvals and a relaxation of the rules to allow for trace amounts of unapproved varieties in shipments.

Even in the United States, where genetically engineered food has been generally accepted, the wheat industry has had to rethink its reluctance to accept biotech varieties.

Because about half of America's wheat crop is exported, farmers and processors feared foreign buyers would reject their products. Facing resistance from American farmers, Monsanto in 2004 suspended development of what would have been the first genetically modified wheat.

But some farmers and millers now say that the lack of genetically engineered wheat has made growing the grain less attractive than growing corn or soybeans. That has, in turn, contributed to shrinking supplies and rising prices for wheat.

Milling & Baking News, an influential trade newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri, said in an editorial that companies that used wheat were now paying the price for their own "hesitancy, if not outright opposition" to biotechnology.

Su-hyun Lee in Seoul, South Korea, and Yasuko Kamiizumi in Tokyo contributed reporting.

Scrap capitalism to save the planet : Bolivian president

United Nations (AFP) April 21, 2008

Bolivian President Evo Morales proposed scrapping capitalism and developing clean energies as part of radical measures "to save the planet and mankind."

"If we really want to save the planet, we must eliminate the capitalist system," Bolivia's first indigenous president told hundreds of indigenous delegates from around the world.

Morales argued that the capitalist system was mainly responsible for climate change and for the "accumulation of waste."

He also railed against the development of biofuels which he said only serve to fuel "poverty and hunger" and he instead expressed strong support for clean energies.

"Biofuels are very harmful, in particular for the poor people of the world," he later told reporters.

The leftist leader called for "respect of Mother Earth," guaranteeing access to basic services for all and putting and end to consumerism.

He noted that indigenous peoples had a different perspective on life, including a stronger commitment to social justice and a preference for communal ownership of the land.

"Mother Earth is not a commodity. It's not something to buy and sell," he said.

And he proposed an international convention "to protect water resources and prevent their privatization by a few."

Morales, who was elected Bolivia's first indigenous president in December 2005, has alienated the country's rich lowland regions, whose populations are largely ethnically European and mixed, by pushing his constitutional plan to redistribute the country's wealth to the poor natives in the mountains.

The Bolivian president also said the UN system, particularly the powerful Security Council, should be "democratized" so that power is not monopolized by a few nations.

In a message to the indigenous forum, UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who is currently on an African tour, said: "I welcome your choice of climate change as the special theme of this session."

"As custodians of these lands, they (indigenous peoples) have accumulated deep, first-hand knowledge about the impacts of environmental degradation, include climate change. They know the economic and social consequences, and they can and should play a role in the global response," he added.

More than 2,500 indigenous delegates were taking part in a two-week session, the first since the UN General Assembly adopted a non-binding declaration last September upholding the human, land and resources rights of the world's 370 million indigenous people.

Indigenous peoples say their lands and territories are endangered by mineral extraction, logging, environmental contamination, privatization and development projects, classification of lands as protected areas or game reserves and use of genetically modified seeds and technology.

20 April 2008

"The farmers are being blackmailed"

Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), 20 April 2008.

[Photo caption: "This is all about the maximization of profits and not about provisioning people" - Horst Seehofer criticizes the international food industry.]

In the debate around increasing food prices, German [Agricultural and] Consumer Affairs Minister Horst Seehofer has attacked the bosses of the international food and feed industry. Instead of focusing on people all they were looking at is the maximizing of profits. Ý

Faced with the threat of imminent famines Federal Minister for Consumer Affairs (CSU) has expressed massive criticism of the international food and animal feed industry. Ý

"They are primarily interested in maximizing profits and not in provisioning people", said CSU Vice Chairman Seehofer on Sunday to Bild am Sonntag [a german tabloid]. "It is not acceptable that in the U.S. there is essentially only one corporation left that supplies seed. This means farmers are blackmailed there and in the developing countries as well." Ý

Seehofer added, "The large concerns and financial investors dominate the scene and one has to rain on their parade. We don't need an industrial but a farmers' agriculture." The Minister pointed to forecasts that the feedstock prices "will increase by 600 percent due to a feedstock shortage. Behind all that is the interest of the multinationals to sell their genetically modified soy/maize." Ý

At the same time, Seehofer defends the use of bio-energy. "For reasons of climate protection in Europe we have decided a more intense use of sustainable raw materials." Seehofer expressed concern over the destruction of rain forests for biofuel and called for an EU regulation. "We must put an energetic stop to the destruction of the virgin forest for foodstuffs and biofuel. I therefore propose that throughout the EU offsetting biofuel for the fuel quota is only permitted if the raw materials for the biofuel do not originate from cleared virgin forests. We strongly emphasize a sustainable production." Ý

EU: BASF presses officials to approve its GM potato

AFP, 20 April 2008.

LIMBURGERHOF, Germany ó German chemical giant BASF is cranking up pressure on the European Commission to get its green light for a genetically modified potato, a world first the company has decided deserves a few pages of advertising.

It wrote an open letter to the European Union's executive branch and bought newspaper pages to present its case after a meeting with EU environment minister Stravos Dimas ended in failure last week.

BASF has grown increasingly irritated with the commission, which has not authorised genetically modified organisms (GMOs) since 1998, and is pushing hard for a patent on its potato. "Is is safe and protects the environment," BASF board member Stefan Marcinowski claimed in a letter printed in several major German dailies on Thursday.

He pressed Brussels to make a decision "without further delay" on a process that was launched in 2006.

In southwestern Germany, meanwhile, a tractor furrows soil amid apparently ordinary gardeners as they cultivate what BASF hopes will be a blockbuster crop.

"Take a look, it's like any other potato, just a bit smaller," suggests a spokeswoman for Plant Science, a BASF unit specialised in biotechnologies.

She stood next to several rows that were planted in front of the group's headquarters in Limburgerhof.

Dubbed Amflora and destined for the European market, the chemical company's humble potato has been altered to bolster its content in amylopectine, a constituent of starch used in textiles, concrete and paper.

Residue of the potato crop was to be mixed into animal feed.

BASF wants to obtain the world's first patent for its genetically modified potato.

Estimated gains along the entire production chain amount 100 million euros (160 million dollars) per year.

"But no one needs it," countered Jutta Jaksche, an expert who works with the consumer protection association Vzbv. "Consumers don't want GMOs, and industry has other technical means to use starch," she added.

Ecologists opposed to GMOs cite the risk of cross pollenisation of potatoes destined for human consumption, since Amflora resists antibiotics and could weaken the effects of medical treatments if edible potatoes were pollentated.

"And the BASF product is really old, the technique is obsolete," added Annemarie Volling, a coordinator for non-GMO agricultural zones in Germany who said Amflora was originally conceived 12 years ago.

"BASF just wants to make money and sell the world's first transgenic potato."

To which the BASF spokeswoman replied: "We already eat seedless raisins ... and no one says a word."

"At any rate, biotechnologies are a fact of life. The question is whether or not Europe will be a part of them."

BASF has pulled out all the stops. The world's leading chemical group sells a wide range of agricultural products including fertilisers and pesticides and is involved in full-scale development of GMO projects.

At Plant Science's farm, behind the rows of Amfora stand rows of greenhouses to which the public is admitted only amidst tight security measures.

Visitors remain on pathways and are instructed not to touch the plants, some of which are wrapped in mosquito netting to prevent pollen from escaping.

"That is rapeseed we are testing, it is bolstered by Omega 3 like that you find in fish," the spokeswoman said.

Elsewhere, rows of flower pots are also covered in netting and their contents identified with yellow plastic markers.

For about a year, BASF has collaborated with the US group Monsanto, at the epicentre of the GMO debate, to develop soja, cotton, rapeseed and corn.

The two groups hope to bring to market by 2012, once it overcomes popular resistancem, a strain of corn that is resistant to drought.

Exposed: the great GM crops myth
Major new study shows that modified soya produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent

The Independent (UK), 20 April 2008. By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor.

Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.

The study - carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt - has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.

Professor Barney Gordon, of the university's department of agronomy, said he started the research - reported in the journal Better Crops - because many farmers who had changed over to the GM crop had "noticed that yields are not as high as expected even under optimal conditions". He added: "People were asking the question 'how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?'"

He grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.

The GM crop - engineered to resist Monsanto's own weedkiller, Roundup - recovered only when he added extra manganese, leading to suggestions that the modification hindered the crop's take-up of the essential element from the soil. Even with the addition it brought the GM soya's yield to equal that of the conventional one, rather than surpassing it.

The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.

The Nebraska study suggested that two factors are at work. First, it takes time to modify a plant and, while this is being done, better conventional ones are being developed. This is acknowledged even by the fervently pro-GM US Department of Agriculture, which has admitted that the time lag could lead to a "decrease" in yields.

But the fact that GM crops did worse than their near-identical non-GM counterparts suggest that a second factor is also at work, and that the very process of modification depresses productivity. The new Kansas study both confirms this and suggests how it is happening.

A similar situation seems to have happened with GM cotton in the US, where the total US crop declined even as GM technology took over.

Monsanto said yesterday that it was surprised by the extent of the decline found by the Kansas study, but not by the fact that the yields had dropped. It said that the soya had not been engineered to increase yields, and that it was now developing one that would.

Critics doubt whether the company will achieve this, saying that it requires more complex modification. And Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington - and who was one of the first to predict the current food crisis - said that the physiology of plants was now reaching the limits of the productivity that could be achieved.

A former champion crop grower himself, he drew the comparison with human runners. Since Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile more than 50 years ago, the best time has improved only modestly . "Despite all the advances in training, no one contemplates a three-minute mile."

Last week the biggest study of its kind ever conducted - the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development - concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.

Professor Bob Watson, the director of the study and chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when asked if GM could solve world hunger, said: "The simple answer is no."

18 April 2008

GM-Free Organic Agriculture to Feed the World
International Panel of 400 Agricultural Scientists Call for Fundamental Change in Farming Practice

Institute of Science in Society press release, 18 April 2008.

A fundamental change in farming practice is needed to counteract soaring food prices, hunger, social inequities and environmental disasters. Genetically modified (GM) crops are highly controversial and will not play a substantial role in addressing the challenges of climate change, loss of biodiversity, hunger and poverty. Instead, small-scale farmers and agro-ecological methods are the way forward; with indigenous and local knowledge playing as important a role as formal science. Furthermore, the rush to grow crops for biofuels could exacerbate food shortages and price rises.

These are the conclusions to the most thorough examination of global agriculture, on a scale comparable to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. Its final report, The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), was formally launched at a plenary in Johannesburg, South Africa on 15 April 2008 [1-3] and simultaneously released in London, Washington, Delhi, Paris, Nairobi and a number of other cities around the world.

The IAASTD is a unique collaboration initiated by the World Bank in partnership with a multi-stakeholder group of organisations, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environmental Programme, the World Health Organisation and representatives of governments, civil society, private sector and scientific institutions from around the world [2]. The actual report runs to 2,500 pages, and has taken more than 400 scientists 4 years to complete.

In one mighty stroke, it has swept aside years of corporate propaganda that served as a major diversion from urgent task of implementing sustainable food production for the world. As UK's Daily Mail editorial commented [4]: "For years, biotech companies have answered critics by insisting genetically modified crops are essential to bringing down food prices and feeding the world's hungry. Well, now we know they're not."Ý

The overarching question is how to reduce hunger and poverty

The overarching question addressed was [5]: "How can we reduce hunger and poverty, improve rural livelihoods, and facilitate equitable, environmentally, socially and economically sustainable development through the generation, access to and use of agricultural knowledge, science and technology?"

The question was prompted by "the unintended social and environmental consequences" of past successes in increasing agricultural productivity through science and technology, and the enormous challenges ahead in providing food and livelihood security [6].

Apart from the depletion of fossil fuels and water, the pressure of population growth, and not least, climate change and a food crisis that has led to food riots and outbreaks of violence in an increasing number of developing countries [7] (see Food Without Fossil Fuels Now, SiS 38).

Both scientific knowledge and traditional skills were evaluated under the IAASTD, which marked the first mainstream attempt at so doing. (Coincidentally, that is just what our ISIS/TWN report, Food Futures Now *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free Ý[8] has also accomplished, which may be why we have come to very similar conclusions.) Contributors produced five regional assessments, and a 126-page synthesis report [6].

Ý"Given the future challenges it was very clear to everyone that business as usual was not an option," IAASTD Co-chair Hans Herren said [1]. He was speaking at an intergovernmental plenary in South Africa's commercial hub, Johannesburg, where the assessment findings were reviewed ahead of the presentation of the report.

An estimated 850 million people are hungry and malnourished today because they can't get access to, or afford the supplies they need, Herren added. "We need better quality food in the right places."

Later he told the BBC [9] that "contentious political and economic stances" were affecting attempts to address some of the imbalances. Specifically, many OECD member countries are deeply opposed to any changes in trade regimes or subsidy systems. He said. "Without reforms, many poorer countries will have a very hard time."

The report said that efforts should focus on the needs of small-scale farmers in diverse ecosystems, and areas with the greatest needs. Measures would include giving farmers better access to knowledge, technology and credit. It would also require investment to bring the necessary information and infrastructure to rural areas.

Biotech industry and US out in the cold

The plenary was marked by some perennial disagreement over biotechnology and trade. During a long debate over biotechnology, the meeting very nearly collapsed [1]. The United States and Australian government delegates objected to the wording in the synthesis report that highlighted concerns over whether the use of GM in food is healthy and safe.

Syngenta and the other biotech and pesticide companies had already abandoned the assessment process late last year. The impasse at the plenary was broken when the two countries agreed to a footnote in the report indicating their reservations about the wording, and to accept the report as a whole, along with Canada and Swaziland, but without adopting the report.

GM biotechnology and trade had been thoroughly debated over the four-year IAASTD process, and the final wording reflected scientific evidence. The report says biotechnology has a role to play in future though it remains a contentious matter. It further notes that patenting of genes causes problems for farmers and researchers.

The other 60 countries represented at the plenary adopted the report.

UK scientist a leading light

IAASTD director of the Secretariat Robert Watson, chief scientist at the World Bank (also independently chief scientist of UK's Department for Environment, Food and Agriculture), spoke at the launch of the Report in London [9].

"We tried to assess the implications of agricultural knowledge, science and technology both past, present and future on a series of very critical issues," Watson explained "These issues are hunger and poverty; rural livelihoods; nutrition and human health...The key point is how do we address these issues in a way that is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable?"

Agriculture could no longer be approached as a single issue, he warned. We need to consider the environmental issues of biodiversity and water; the economic issues of marketing and trade, and the social concerns of gender and culture.

Watson outlined some of the challenges facing the sector over the coming 50 years: "We need to enhance rural livelihoods where most of the poor live on one or two dollars a day. We also need to stimulate economic growth because half of the countries in Africa have a significant percentage of their GDP in the agricultural sector. At the same time, we need to meet food safety standards and make sure that we do not have pesticide residues, unacceptable levels of hormones or heavy metals. All of this must be done in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner."

He later told John Vidal of The Guardian [10] that governments and industry focused too narrowly on increasing food production, with little regard for natural resources or food security.

"Continuing with current trends would mean the earth's haves and have-nots splitting further apart," he said. " It would leave us facing a world nobody would want to inhabit. We have to make food more affordable and nutritious without degrading the land."

The UK Government has not among the 60 countries that have signed up to the report, but Watson indicated that it has the full support of the Prime Minister [3].

GM crops not the answer

Biotech companies, trade bodies and associated scientists have exploited the food crisis to step up their propaganda for GM crops. And the UK government's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has been exposed for misusing substantial public funds to support marketing GM crops to UK farmers and issuing a misleading press release on how UK farmers are "upbeat" about GM crops [11, 12] (Marketing Masquerading as Scientific Survey and UK Farmers Upbeat about GM Crops" Debunked, SiS 38)

Professor Watson told the Daily Mail [3]: "Are transgenics the simple answer to hunger and poverty? I would argue, no."

He said much more research was needed to establish whether they offer benefits and do not harm the environment. The industrialisation of agriculture, of which GM is a part, has led to the heavy use of artificial fertilisers and other chemicals, and these have harmed the soil structure and polluted waterways. The leeching of the soil of essential minerals means food is less healthy than 60 years ago.

The IAASTD states [10]: "Assessment of the technology lags behind its development, information is anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty about possible benefits and damage is unavoidable."

The authors also warned that the global rush to biofuels was not sustainable. "The diversion of crops to fuel can raise food prices and reduce our ability to alleviate hunger. The negative social effects risk being exacerbated in cases where small-scale farmers are marginalised or displaced from their land."

Professor Janice Jiggins of Wageningen University, one of the scientists co-authoring the IAASTD, questioned whether GM crops have been proven as safe [3]: "There are many legitimate concerns about the presence of transgenics in food, as well as the safety standards that might be appropriate as these enter into animal and human food," she said.

Report widely welcomed by NGOs

The report was widely welcomed [10]. A group of eight international environmental and consumer groups, including Third World Network, Practical Action, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth said in a statement: "This is a sobering account of the failure of industrial farming. Small-scale farmers and ecological methods provide the way forward to avert the current food crisis and meet the needs of communities."

Lim Li Ching of Third World Network said: "It clearly shows that small-scale farmers and the environment lose under trade liberalisation. Developing countries must exercise their right to stop the flood of cheap subsidized products from the north."

Guilhem Calvo, an adviser with the ecological and earth sciences division of UNESCO, one of the report's sponsors, said at a news conference in Paris: "We must develop agriculture that is less dependent on fossil fuels, favours the use of locally available resources and explores the use of natural processes such as crop rotation and use of organic fertilisers."

Greenpeace welcomed the publication as [2] "an historic opportunity to replace destructive chemical-intensive agriculture with methods that work with nature not against it."

Pete Riley of GM Freeze in the UK said: "We are delighted that the hyped claims about the current development in GM crops feeding the world are rejected. We call upon the Government, industry and science to respond positively to the challenge the report lays down and change their approach to scientific research so it is led by and reflects the needs of those who it should benefit - not the needs of corporations."

For a full range of practical solutions to follow on from the IAASDT see our ISIS TWN Report, Food Futures Now *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free Ý[8], to be launched in UK Parliament 22 April 2008 www.i-sis.org.uk

References

1. "Africa: Reinventing Agriculture", Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service,Ý (Johannesburg), 15 April 2008, http://allafrica.com/stories/200804150171.html

2. "Urgent changes needed in global farming practices to avoid environmental destruction" Greenpeace International Press Release, 15 April 2008.

3. "GM foods 'not the answer' to world's food shortage crisis, report says", Sean Poulter, The Daily Mail, 16 April 2008 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?
in_article_id=559965&in_page_id=1770

4. GM food, biofuels and a hungry world, Editorial, The Daily Mail, 16 April 2008 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?
in_page_id=1787&in_article_id=559945

5. What is the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science & Technology, IAASD? A compilation from its plenary decisions and official documents, http://www.agassessment-watch.org/docs/IAASTD_on_three_pages.pdf

6. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science & Technology (IAASTD) Synthesis Report 25 November 2007, http://www.agassessment.org/docs/Synthesis_Report_261107_text.pdf

7. Ho MW. Food without fossil fuels now. Invited Keynote Lecture, 2nd Mediterranean Conference on Organic Agriculture in Croatia, Organic Agriculture - Contribution to Sustainable Ecosystem, 2-6 April 2008, Dubrovnik University. Dubrovnik, Croatia, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/foodWithoutFossilFuels.php

8. Ho MW, Burcher S, Lim LC et al. Food Futures Now, Organic, Sustainable, Fossil Fuel Free, ISIS TWN Report, London & Penang, 2008.

9. "Global food system 'must change'" BBC News, 15 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7347239.stm

10. "Change in farming can feed world - report", John Vidal, The Guardian, 16 April 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/16/food.biofuels

11. Saunders PT. Marketing masquerading as scientific survey. Science in Society 38 (to appear).

12. Ho MW and Saunders PT. "UK faremers upbeat about GM crops" debunked. Science in Society 38 (to appear).

French Senate passes controversial GMO bill

FoodProductionDaily.com, 18 April 2008. By Dominique Patton.

France's upper house of parliament has passed a bill that sets out conditions for growing genetically modified crops, despite heavy opposition from environmental campaigners.

The bill was voted through after heated debate over an amendment introduced by Communist Andre Chassaigne to protect against GMO contamination of other crops.

The amendment makes it compulsory for farmers to "respect agricultural structures, local ecosystems and non-GMO commercial and production industries".

Socialist delegates said the amendment was a "major advantage for GMO-free cultures", since it represented a legal basis to exclude GMO from certain zones and protect against cross-contamination.

Greenpeace says it will have little impact without a proper definition of GMO written into the bill. Under the new bill France's High Council on Biotechnology will be responsible for defining what "non-GMO" means in terms of production for crop varieties. However this is likely to lead to controversy.

According to a report in French paper Liberation, the concept of non-GMO today has "no legal basis". The only existing law relates to labelling on food products and instead defines products "with GMOs".Ý For the UMP minister Jean Bizet, "non-GMO is therefore below 0.9 per cent". However the Greens claim that levels are detectable at 0.1 per cent.Ý

"We think they'll say that non-GM means a little GM, or up to a threshold of 0.9 per cent," said Apoteker. "That means the law is going to legalise contamination with GMOs. This fails to protect GMO-free agriculture."

The recently approved bill has been supported by most French farmers who are growing increasing amounts of genetically modified crops. French GM crop cultivation experienced the greatest increase in Europe last year, quadrupling in size from 5,000 hectares in 1996 to over 21,000 hectares.

But there is also a powerful opposition lobby, made up of environmental groups like Greenpeace and activists such as Jose Bove.

One of their main concerns is that pollination could cross-contaminate non-GM crops grown in the vicinity - and that ultimately the long-term health effects of GM on humans are not known.

"Although we back the amendment, we still think they should reject this law and put a better one in place," said Arnaud Apoteker, Greenpeace GM campaigner.

The bill will return to the lower house of parliament, or National Assembly, in the second half of May before becoming law. The opposition fears however that the amendment may be completely re-written when it returns for the second reading.

France's President Sarkozy introduced a ban on new cultivation of GMO crops in France last October after a government committee said it had found new evidence of damage that GM crops could cause to diversity and the environment.

The recently passed bill is however in response to European Union demands that member states formulate laws on GMO use.

Coalition calls on NGOs to withdraw support to Responsible Soy Roundtable

Global Forest Coalition, 18 April 2008.

One week before the third meeting of the Roundta