New Breeding Techniques the next step in corporate control over our food?

The biotech industry is staging an audacious bid to have a whole new generation of genetic engineering techniques excluded from European regulations. The pending decision of the European Commission on the regulation of these so-called 'new GMOs' represents a climax point in the ongoing below-the-radar attack by industry on GM laws.PDF version of this article Versión de este artículo en PDF (en castellano)

Please help us to stop the approval for 'toxic soybeans'!

Send a an email to Mr Jean Claude Juncker!

Mix of residues left in plants from combined spraying of herbicides raises health concerns

We are calling for the approval process for market authorisation of herbicide resistant genetically soybeans produced by Bayer and Monsanto to be stopped. These soybean varieties can all be sprayed with a combination of herbicides, such as glyphosate together with dicamba or isoxaflutole (MON87708 x MON89788 and FG72).

According to a recent toxicological dossier, the mixtures of these residues are thought to cause adverse effects on health, such as genotoxicity, liver toxicity and tumours. Consumers and farm animals could be exposed to a combination of these substances: The residues may be found in the harvested crops intended for import into the EU. However, the EU authorities have never assessed the combined toxicity of the herbicides.

In a letter to Testbiotech from January 2016, the Commission admits that “it is true that the legislation requires cumulative and synergistic effects of pesticide residues to be considered”. But it also states that methods to assess these health effects are not yet available.

If the EU Commission and the European Food Safety Authority EFSA are unable to assess the health effects of these mixtures because there are no methods available for this purpose, then market authorisation cannot be granted. EU regulations require the highest standards for the protection of consumers and the environment. In the case of the genetically engineered plants under discussion, the precautionary principle has to be applied and the application has to be rejected.

Please send an e-mail: www.testbiotech.org/en/toxic-soy

Further information: www.testbiotech.org/en/node/1548

Thank you very much!

Close to Home: Making this area a GMO Free Zone

There is a grass-roots movement afoot in Sonoma County to join our neighbors to the north and south in creating a coastal GMO free zone. Volunteers for the group Citizens for Healthy Farms and Families can be spotted all over the county collecting signatures to qualify the Sonoma County Transgenic Contamination Prevention Ordinance for the ballot in November.

This ordinance would prohibit the “propagation, cultivation, raising or growing of genetically engineered organisms in Sonoma County.”

Roundup-ready, genetically engineered crops (corn) and grasses (alfalfa, blue grass and fescue) are already moving into Sonoma County. New crops are awaiting approval. This ban on genetically engineered crops is needed in order to protect Sonoma County organic and conventional agriculture from contamination by genetically engineered plant pollen. Without this protection, our families, water and wildlife will continue to suffer from negative health and environmental effects associated with increased Roundup herbicide spraying.

While the overwhelming response to our signature drive has been positive, I have been perplexed over the past several months on the signature-gathering trail by some of the negative viewpoints expressed.

Bt Brinjal, the genetically modified brinjal introduced in Bangladesh despite concerns and failures in performances, is imposed again for the third round with newer farmers during 2015 – 2016 winter crop season. No report has been published as research findings of the first two rounds of field cultivation except some propaganda news. The website (both Bengali and English page) of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) has no information. It only says Bt Begun (Bt Brinjal). That’s all. The page is just blank. Even International Service for the Acquisition for Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA) did not publish any report after its Brief 47: The Status of Commercialized Bt Brinjal in Bangladesh, in 2014. There is nothing in 2015 which could have reported about the the so-called 'success' of the second round field cultivation. In the second round Bt brinjals seedlings were given 108 farmers, of which 79 farmers were interviewed by UBINIG and were found to have massive failures.

This ‘new’ mustard in our kitchen could soon be harmful to us. Mustard oil is an everyday consumption item for lakhs of families across India. Almost all our curries are incomplete without a seasoning of mustard and mustard products find their way into our food in various ways. Don’t we have babies massaged with mustard oil? Have we not enjoyed Sarson da Saag on cold winter days?

And now our mustard is getting Genetically Modified. Shockingly, important information about this new Genetically Modified (GM) mustard is not being disclosed to us.

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This is a fight for the food we eat everyday. Sign the petition and forward this campaign to your friends.

The EU is considering the exclusion of gene-edited plants and animals from GMO (genetically modified organism) regulations. Two scientists explore this in an article in The Ecologist. The current debate surrounds applications of gene-editing that, instead of inserting genes, re-write genes using a sort of 'DNA typewriter'. In both EU law and the UN Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, GMOs involve novel arrangements of genetic material that do not occur naturally, and alterations to genetic material being made directly without mating. The article concludes that gene-editing does produce GMOs and should be regulated as such.

Products of gene-editing with re-written genes that might be imported, grown or farmed in Europe in the near future include a herbicide-tolerant oil seed rape, produced by a technique known as oligonucleotide directed mutagenesis (ODM), and hornless cattle, developed through a popular gene-editing technique known as 'CRISPR'.

CRISPR applications are moving ahead so fast that many scientists are calling for caution as major safety and ethical concerns need to be addressed.

A USDA study shows that a GM alfalfa has gone wild in alfalfa-growing parts of the West. This may explain GMO contamination incidents that have cost US growers and exporters millions of dollars - and it exposes the failure of USDA's 'coexistence' policy for GMOs and traditional crops.

The US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) has long maintained that genetically engineered (GE) crops can co-exist with traditional and organic agriculture.

According to this 'co-existence' narrative, if neighboring GE and traditional farmers just sort things out among themselves and follow 'best management practices', transgenes will be confined to GE crops and the fields where they are planted.

Organic farmers have raised the alarm over the potential “severe” economic and environmental consequences of new plant breeding techniques for Europe’s farming sector, calling for GMO legislation to apply when approving new seed traits.

In a policy paper due to be published later today (14 January), the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements EU (IFOAM EU) urges the European Commission to classify NPBTs as falling "within the scope of the GMO legislation”.

These new techniques should “be subject to a risk assessment”, and “mandatory traceability and labelling requirements that apply to other GMOs”, according to the policy paper, seen by EurActiv.

The EU executive is expected to rule in the coming months whether they fall within the scope of GMO legislation or not.

Increasing opposition against patents on conventional breeding

18 January 2016. On 20 January the European Patent Office (EPO) will hold a public hearing on the opposition to a European Patent on melons (EP1962578). Monsanto is using this patent, to claim melons with a natural resistance to plant viruses as its own invention, derived from breeding without genetic engineering. The patent was granted by the European Patent Office (EPO) even though European Patent Law does not allow patents on the conventional breeding of plants and animals. The resistance was copied from Indian melons. The opposition is also supported by the renowned Indian activist Vandana Shiva and her organisation Navdanya.

“Monsanto’s melon Patent is biopiracy at its most devious. First of all, the patented resistance was not invented by Monsanto – just discovered in an Indian melon. Monsanto is now pretending to be the first to have bred it into other melons – but to copy something is not an invention”, says Francois Meienberg from Berne Declaration. “Secondly, Monsanto has violated the Indian Biodiversity Act implementing rules on Access and Benefit-Sharing based on the Convention on Biological Diversity. It would be a disgrace if the European Patent Office rewards Monsanto with a patent based on a flagrant violation of Indian law.”

The Berne Declaration has access to a letter sent by the National Biodiversity Authority of India to Monsanto in November 2012, explicitly stating that “The actions of Monsanto in using Indian melon varieties in research and development with commercial intent including application of a patent based on Indian melon varieties amounts to a blatant violation of Section 3 and 6 of the Biological Diversity Act.”

The melon patent is just one of several patents granted on plants and animals derived from conventional breeding by the EPO. Recent No Patents on Seeds! research shows that in 2015 around hundred new patent applications were filed. These patents concern carrots, potatoes, brassica plants, maize, melons, pepper, rice, lettuce, soybeans, spinach, tomatoes, wheat and onions. Amongst the applicants are big companies like Bayer, Dupont/Pioneer, Monsanto, Syngenta and Dow AgroSciences. All in all, around 1400 patent applications on conventional breeding are pending with around 180 being granted already by the EPO.

Opposition is growing against these patents: Around 80.000 individuals and more than 200 organisations have signed a call from No Patents on Seeds! within the last few months demanding that patents on conventional breeding are stopped. Further, today in Germany the organisation Campact, together with its European partners and also supported by “No Patents on Seeds!”, is starting a campaign urging national governments to take more action in the fight against patents on plants and animals.

The coalition No Patents on Seeds! is supported by Arche Noah (Austria), Bionext (Netherlands), The Berne Declaration (Switzerland), GeneWatch (UK), Greenpeace, Misereor (Germany), Development Fund (Norway), NOAH (Denmark), No Patents on Life (Germany), ProSpecieRara (Switzerland), Red de Semillas (Spain), Rete Semi Rurali (Italy), Reseau Semences Paysannes (France) and Swissaid (Switzerland). They are all calling for a revision of European Patent Law to exclude breeding material, breeding processes, plants and animals, their characteristics, their genetic components, the harvest and food derived thereof from patentability.

http://no-patents-on-seeds.org/

2,4-D crops: An unsustainable techno-fix for the failure of herbicide-tolerant GM crops

Author: Antje Lorch

Publisher: TWN

Year Published: 2016

Why old herbicides are returning

“Less herbicides, less toxic herbicides, protecting the environment and farm workers from impacts of agro-chemicals, stopping soil erosion.” Those were the slogans to promote the

first generation of genetically modified (GM) crops, engineered to be tolerant to herbicides. This envisioned golden future was all too brief, however, and is in fact already past. After the introduction of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops – tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate – in the USA and a few other countries, weeds soon became resistant to glyphosate and have posed increasing problems to farmers. Instead of stepping back from herbicide-tolerant crops, the GM industry is now stepping up the

development of new GM crops that are tolerant to multiple – and often older, more toxic – herbicides. Among them: GM crops engineered to be tolerant to 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D).