from Claire Robinson, WEEKLY WATCH editor
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Dear all:
The biotech industry has been claiming that GM has saved US farmers from drought, which is surprising considering that there are no drought-resistant GM crops available. What is less surprising is that this claim appears to be based on no evidence at all -- just the opinion of a single representative of a company punting biotech seeds! (THE AMERICAS)
Claire This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
www.gmwatch.org / www.lobbywatch.org
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CONTENTS
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GM RICE CONTAMINATION SCANDAL
ASIA
AFRICA
THE AMERICAS
EUROPE
IMPORTANT TV DOCUMENTARY
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CONTAMINATION SCANDAL
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+ RUSSIA: U.S. RICE IMPORTS SUSPENDED
The Rosselkhoznadzor, the Russian agricultural inspection agency, announced 29 September that it has stopped issuing quarantine permits for US rice because of the presence of illegal GM rice, which had not passed safety tests.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7098
+ CROP CIRCLES APPEAR ON THREE CONTINENTS
Greenpeace activists on 3 October created giant crop circles in maize fields on three different continents to mark the beginning of a global campaign to protect maize - one of the world's most important staple foods - against contamination from GM varieties. The crop circles - large enough to be clearly visible from the air - appeared in fields in Spain, the Philippines and Mexico.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7098
+ SCIENTISTS AND OTHERS PROTEST
Many scientists and others have signed an open letter to the food agencies of European countries calling on them to recall all products contaminated with illegal rice LL601 on grounds of food safety.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7090
+ GENEWATCH COMMENT ON CONTAMINATION
Dr Sue Mayer of Genewatch comments:
There are now 132 [GM contamination] incidents on the register and they show GM contamination can arise at every stage of development - from the laboratory, to the field, to the plate.
It shows that the controls in place are prone to failure and human error is increasingly being shown to take place - people seem unable or unwilling to take the precautions required by the law or commercial demands.
For many in the biotech industry, the fuss caused by GM contamination episodes, such as those from LL601RICE and Bt10 maize, is excessive because they do not believe there is a risk to human health or the environment.
Because the full details of these GM crops are not in the public domain, an independent assessment of claims of safety is not possible. Whether these particular GMOs are harmful or not, their presence in the food chain demonstrates the inability of the industry to maintain separation between GM and non-GM lines.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7088
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ASIA
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+ MOST FARMER SUICIDES RELATE TO GM COTTON - TIMES OF INDIA
The Times of India reports that the introduction of Bt cotton in Vidarbha has led to a spurt of farmer suicides.
Most suicide cases relate to those farming families which have run up huge debts because of the high cost in using the expensive genetically-modified cotton seeds, which have to be bought every year.
GM Watch comment:
This report comes in the same week as Indo-Swiss research showing India's organic cotton producers benefit from 40% lower input costs, up to 20% lower production costs, almost comparable labour costs, and higher cotton yields - all of which makes them far less vulnerable to loan sharks.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7077
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7087
+ INDIA'S AG MINISTER PAWAR UNLEASHES CORPORATIONS, IGNORES VICTIMS
Nobody should be more aware than India's Minister for Agriculture of the devastating nature of the country's current agrarian crisis. Sharad Pawar was formerly chief minister of the state at the very epicentre of the escalating farmer suicides wracking rural India, and Maharashtra still provides Pawar with his power base.
The critical role played by Bt cotton in the plague of suicides affecting India's debt-burdened farmers, has been identified repeatedly in articles from the New York Times to the Times of India. And the award-winning Rural Affairs editor of The Hindu, P Sainath, has described the promoting of Bt cotton in the dry and un-irrigated cotton-belt of Maharashtra as "murderous".
If so, India's Minister for Agriculture might be considered one of the murderers because Pawar was personally involved in promoting Bt cotton in Maharashtra, according to Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS), a local pressure group for farmers. VJAS spokesman, Kishor Tiwari, also says that one of the brands of Bt seeds on sale - "Ajit Bt" - is actually owned by Pawar's nephew, Ajit Pawar. Pawar's associates in the state government have also had a big hand in pushing Bt cotton.
And despite the resulting carnage, Pawar's GM promotionals are still in full swing. He recently boasted to a corporate-backed conference on ag biotech that besides Bt cotton, there are lots more transgenic crops in India's "pipeline".
While India's Agriculture Minister is perfectly happy to go out and advertise his support for GM crops, the journalist P Sainath notes that Pawar has never once visited any of the distressed families of the dead farmers.
Sainath describes multinationals like Monsanto as having played a "devastating" role in India's current farm crisis. But it's policy makers like Sharad Pawar who've promoted their interests and given them free rein.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7091
+ RE-ENGINEERING FOOD
As India's ag minister threatens to unleash scores of GM foods in India, Suman Sahai of Gene Campaign provides an excellent summary of the worrying research results on GM food safety.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7096
+ MONSANTO CLOTHES GM COTTON IN PR SUCCESS
An opinion piece by Felipe Osorio, the director of Mahyco Monsanto Biotech (India) was published this week by the Indian daily paper, the Financial Express.
But many of Osorio's key claims in "Clothed in genetic success" are open to question.
Here are a few examples:
*Osorio: Indian farmers want GM crops because they reduce costs and increase productivity.
Comment: Could Mahyco Monsanto's massive campaign of hype, which has included everything from dancing girls to a touring Bollywood star, have had anything to do with why Indian farmers want GM crops?
Mahyco Monsanto, and its sub-licensee Bt seed companies, have been accused of pulling every dirty trick in the PR book in order to lure India's farmers into using GM cotton.
*Osorio: The steadily increasing Bollgard acres being planted by increasing numbers of Indian farmers bear testimony to its success.
Comment: The same could have been said about the ever increasing number of investors caught up in any stock market bubble - before it finally burst, that is.
Donald White, a University of Illinois plant pathologist, describes the way that hype and fashion can drive farmer choices as "a herd mentality". "Everyone has to have a biotech program", he says, and that chimes in with a University of Iowa study on farmers growing GM soya. The study found that while increasing yields was cited by the majority of farmers in the study as the reason for their choosing GM soya, the research showed they were actually getting lower yields!
***Osorio: The second IMRB study conducted in 2005 reconfirms that for the fourth successive year, the benefits of Bollgard cotton to Indian farmers included better yields, reduced pesticides use and higher profits.
Comment: What Osorio doesn't tell the reader is that IMRB is a market research company hired by Monsanto. Nor does he mention that the company's methods and findings have been heavily contested. A number of other studies - some involving significantly greater farmer contact then the IMRB surveys - have consistently shown higher net profits from non-Bt cotton.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7099
+ INDIA'S REGULATORY SYSTEM "SCANDALOUSLY LAX"
Two contrasting articles from the Indian press comment on India's regulatory system. The first from the Times of India describes India's regulatory body - the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) - as "a mere rubber stamp", pointing out that it cleared as many as 142 proposals for multi-locational GM field trials in just 4 meetings, until the Supreme Court stepped in to call a halt. And the Times of India describes India's field testing as "scandalously lax".
By contrast, the Indian Express praises India's "fairly rational GM policy" and says it just needs streamlining to speed things upand help it handle efficiently "the flood of applications coming India's way." Most remarkably, it describes India's testing of GM crops as being marked by "abundant caution".
The Express piece is extremely misleading, given the clear evidence of blatant violations of biosafety guidelines during field trials. The GEAC and India's state governments have admitted that they are not even kept informed by the likes of Monsanto as to where exactly the GM crop trials are happening!
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7100
+ INDIA SHOULD RESIST U.S. ATTEMPTS TO FORCE GM FOODS ONTO IT
With India not accepting GM foods, the US is trying to rope in the WTO to exert pressure, says Bhaskar Goswami an article in India's Financial Express. It is opposing India's efforts to set standards for labeling GM products. Terming them as trade restrictive, it has threatened to invoke the WTO provisions on barriers to trade.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7096
+ GM CROPS HURT DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
In an article for India Together, Suman Sahai argues that GM is providing alternative ways for developed societies to procure commodities that have traditionally been supplied by developing countries. The shift in trading patterns threatens the economic base of farmers who have traditionally grown the crops from which these products were made.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7095
+ RICE IN A PRIVATE GRIP
Devinder Sharma writes that Swiss biotech giant Syngenta, based at Basel in Switzerland, has tightened its monopoly control over rice.
EXCERPT:
Seeking global patents over thousands of gene in rice (a single grain of rice contains 37, 544 genes, roughly one-fourth more than the genes in a human body), the multinational giant is all set to "own" rice, the world's most important staple food crop...
It is in Asia still that more than 97 per cent of the world's rice is grown ... [but the] biological inheritance of the world's major food crop is now in the hands of a Swiss multinational. If Syngenta's application for global patents is accepted, the Asian countries will lose all control... of the staple grain.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7095
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AFRICA
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+ GM LOBBYISTS' LIES OVER ZAMBIA EXPOSED YET AGAIN
Here's an interesting quote from Charles Mushitu of the Zambian Red Cross. It's taken from a TV documentary broadcast by BBC World that looked in part at Zambia's refusal of GM food aid in 2002, which triggered a massive propaganda onslaught from the GM lobby claiming starvation would be the result.
In the programme, Charles Mushitu and David Stevens, director of the World Food Programme, describe how alternative sources of (non-GM) food aid were successfully provided for Zambia, when it refused to accept GM grain, and Mushitu makes the following unambiguous statement: "We didn't record a single death arising out of hunger."
This is what the Zambian government has always said happened and it further exposes the GM lobby's rewriting of history over the GM food aid issue and their cynical attempts to manufacture dead Zambians, starving children and crimes against humanity to suit their propaganda purposes.
What the GM lobby claimed:
CHILDREN STARVED
***"aid workers were taking food away from the mouths of starving children." - Roger Bate, Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
***"Radical Greens spread rumours that the [GM] corn was poisonous, and might cause cancer, or even AIDS. So it got locked up in warehouses, while children starved..." - Paul Driessen, syndicated US columnist
THOUSANDS STARVED
***"...thousands of [Zambians] starved to death or succumbed to diseases due to increased susceptibility from malnutrition" - Alex Avery of the Hudson Institute
20,000 DIED
***"This was just one more example of the folly of the 'precautionary principle,' and how it is killing poor people in Africa... perhaps as many as 20,000 Zambians died as a result." - Roger Bate, Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
POTENTIAL GENOCIDE
"The Bush administration is not going to sit there and let these groups kill millions of poor people in southern Africa through their ideological campaign" -Andrew Natsios, then head of USAID
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
***"How did we get that far; who was responsible for whispering (those) messages to those [Zambian] policy makers... That is something that I would rather sooner or later want to find out, because you're talking about literally crimes against humanity" - Willy DeGreef, former Head of Regulatory Affairs at Syngenta
***African leaders who refused US food aid should be tried "for the highest crimes against humanity in the highest courts of the world." - Tony Hall, US Ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture Agencies
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7092
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THE AMERICAS
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+ GM CROPS SAVING AMERICA'S FARMERS FROM DROUGHT???
An article which topped the pro-GM AgBioView list last week claims GM crops are drought resistant and that without them the Midwestern farm economy would have been devastated this year:
"An August 11 federal government crop report shows biotechnology is saving the Midwestern farm economy from devastation in the wake of this summer's prolonged drought."
The impression that it is the federal government which is saying this is quickly dispelled when one looks at the 3 source articles given for this piece, from which it is clear that the US Dept of Agriculture report referred to simply provides survey-based estimates of this year's production levels for various crops, and not an analysis of how those production levels were achieved.
So where does the claim that the "report shows biotechnology is saving the Midwestern farm economy from devastation" originate?
One of the 3 press pieces - the one which came out ahead of the USDA report - looks at the predictions and views of 20 analysts about what the USDA report will contain. Although this piece is headlined, "Biotech Seeds Helping U.S. Crops Survive Heat, Analysts Say," it in fact only quotes one of those analyst to that effect - Kevin Dahlman, president of Dahlco Seeds, a Minnesota-based company that aims to ensure "the flow of the best genetics with the latest technologies to our customers".
The other 2 articles, which came out after the USDA report, contain no references to biotech.
So where did AgBioView get this article about a government report showing biotech was saving US crop production? The answer is the Heartland Institute. Who they? A rightwing lobby group with Big Tobacco and Big Oil funding that campaigns for smokers' rights and free market solutions to social and environmental problems (i.e. pro-GM, anti-Kyoto, etc.) and which likes to quote Greg Conko the Monsanto-backed lobbyist and co-founder of, er... AgBioView.
More: http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7094
+ ORGANIC BETTER THAN GM IN SAVING FARMERS FROM DROUGHT - EXPERT
GM Watch asked the former biotech specialist for the Environmental Protection Agency, Dr Doug Gurian-Sherman, how seriously we should take claims of drought resistance via GM crops never designed to deliver drought resistance.
EXCERPT from his reply:
The better soil in organic farming also holds water better than the often compacted soil on industrial farms, and is better aerated (has better structure), so roots often grow better. In addition, traditional breeding can help. For example, Mary Eubank (Duke University) has crossed corn with a North American relative, eastern gamma grass. She gets extremely robust root systems that are reported to provide drought resistance and rootworm resistance (not surprisingly, she has had some trouble getting funding - despite starting with, I believe, a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to do her work).
As always, the standard of comparison in experiments evaluating GMOs is of critical importance, and greatly affects the results. Experiments with GE crops are almost never compared to organic cultivation (and even less frequently with long-standing organic farms where the soil has had a chance to build).
I can't think of any reason that GMO soybeans (Roundup Ready) would have any advantage in drought. Conservation tillage has advanced in soybeans over the last 15 years, and limiting tillage will allow the soil to retain more moisture and better structure. Proponents of biotech claim that a lot of the increase in conservation tillage acres in soybeans has been due to the introduction of the RR trait. But a study, by the USDA on that in 2002 says that there is no evidence supporting this contention. In fact, national statistics show that no-till and reduced tillage acres were expanding faster in soybeans for several years BEFORE RR soybeans than after. There also was a direct long-term experiment comparing organic soybeans and conventional (not GMO) done by the Rodale folks, and in drought years, the organic fields yielded substantially better.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7094
+ MONSANTO PATENTS BEING USED TO BANKRUPT FARMERS
The Public Patent Foundation filed formal requests with the US Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine four of Monsanto Corporation's patents related to GM crops that the agricultural giant is using to sue - and in some cases bankrupt - American farmers. In its filings, PUBPAT submitted prior art showing the patents were obvious in light of earlier work by other inventors and, as such, should have never been granted.
Monsanto has filed dozens of patent infringement lawsuits asserting the four challenged patents against American farmers, many of whom are unable to hire adequate representation to defend themselves in court. The crime these farmers are accused of is nothing more than saving seed from one year's crop to replant the following year, something farmers have done since the beginning of time.
Said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's executive director, "It appears as though Monsanto wants to control all of America's farmland and - unfortunately - the patent system is providing them the perfect means to accomplish that goal by bullying independent and family owned farms right out of existence."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7081
+ MONSANTO SUED FOR ALLEGED GLYPHOSATE MONOPOLY
Monsanto is the target of a class-action antitrust lawsuit filed in federal court. Pullen Seeds and Soil, based in Sac City, Iowa, allege the company violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, as it has a monopoly over the glyphosate herbicide marketplace with its Roundup products. Monsanto's patent on Roundup product name expired in 2000.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7081
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EUROPE
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+ GM POTATOES - FACTS AND FICTIONS
Andy Rees, former Weekly Watch editor and author of the new book Genetically Modified Food - A Short Guide for the Confused, debunks biotech industry myths about the GM potatoes that may be coming to the UK next year, at
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7097
+ GM TRADE WAR: "NO WINNERS" SAYS FOE AS WTO MAKES RULING PUBLIC
Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth Europe commented on the WTO ruling, "Whatever the World Trade Organisation says, the dispute over GM foods has created no clear winners but many losers. The public faces contaminated foods resulting from weak regulations in the United States and farmers see their livelihoods threatened by contamination. This trade dispute has been a pointless exercise that will change absolutely nothing. Europeans will continue to reject GM foods."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7082
MORE ON THE WTO REPORT
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7089
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IMPORTANT TV DOCUMENTARY
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A TV documentary looking at the GM controversy in India, Zambia, and Argentina was broadcast last year by BBC World. The programme summary at
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7093
shows just how important a documentary this is.
EXCERPTS:
***ON INDIA: Devinder Sharma is a Political Analyst. "If you look at the reports of the Department of Biotechnology, BT cotton consumes about 20 per cent more water than hybrid cotton. And scientists knew it, industry knew it..."
The problem appears to be that cotton farmers, like Banoth Balu, were not told about this drawback.
Banoth Balu: "I was told that Bt cotton gives good yields and requires no sprays. I planned to take land on lease for two to three years and grow this with a hope that I would be able to repay most of my debts. All my hopes were crushed. The BT crop did not germinate and my wife committed suicide three months ago because of it. She went to the field and drank pesticide."
According to Warangal authorities, suicides among the farmers farmer's have continued at a rate of over 20 a month after the harvest failure in 2004.
The irony was that those who stuck with the conventional, more drought resistant cotton fared better.
PV Sateesh: "Bt cotton could not adapt because it was technologically manipulated and this technological manipulation could not adapt itself to these stressed conditions. The people who grew non-Bt cotton made six times more profits than the BT cotton people."
***ON ARGENTINA: But as more and more land was switched to GM soya cultivation, over 150,000 small farmers have quit their land, claiming they can no longer compete.
Orchards, greenbelts and dairy farms have gone under the Soya juggernaut. It is good for the country's exports but incredibly, the country now has to import basic foodstuffs such as milk and potatoes.
It is how free trade is meant to work - the problem is that half the country can't afford the imported food. Recently, the National Institute of Statistics and Consensus estimated that half of Argentina's population was unable to meet their basic food needs.
***ON GM FOOD SAFETY: Prof. Jorge Kaczewer is a toxicologist at the University of Buenos Aires. He explains some of his recent research.
"We can see that consummation of GM corn leads direct changes in the bowel, changes in the bowel mucous of animals fed with this. And look at the cell growth in animals consuming GM and this is a normal bowel of a rat, which didn't eat GM corn. We already know that GM soya beans were approved without enough long-term experiments to determine that they're safe."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7093