no patents on seeds

Press release

7 December 2015 Munich.

The European Patent Office (EPO) is granting more and more patents on conventional breeding. Now a final decision is about to be taken on a patent on tomatoes with reduced water content (EP1211926). Tomorrow, the EPO will have its final hearing on this patent, after which it will grant the patent with just some small changes to the wording. Together with a patent on broccoli (EP10698190), the patent on tomatoes has attracted major international attention and sparked intense debate over several years. At the end of March 2015, the EPO used these two cases to make a precedent decision in order to declare plants and animals derived from conventional breeding as patentable. There is currently growing opposition to this decision: Patent authorities and representatives of the governments of Austria, France, Germany and The Netherlands are amongst those who have publicly criticised the EPO decision.

“It is now up to politicians to show they can succeed in the fight against the well-organised interests of the patent business”, says Christoph Then, one of the speakers for the international coalition of “No Patents on Seeds!”. “The EPO, the patent attorneys and big corporations are all benefitting from these patents, but the negative consequences concern society as a whole. It is of the greatest importance that the existing prohibitions are properly implemented.”

Food was high on the agenda at the Paris climate talks this week—here are some of the highlights

It’s become a catch-22 of our times: the global food system is both a villain and a victim of climate change. Agriculture accounts for almost a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and yet floods, drought, and the planet’s increasing climatic variability play with the fate of our food. Continuing on the current climate trajectory will mean a future of profound food insecurity, especially for developing nations.

This week, these concerns have been prominent on the agenda at the COP21 climate talks in Paris. For the first time at a COP conference, agriculture had its own dedicated focus-day, held on Tuesday by the Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA), a partnership established between France and Peru to showcase and strengthen on-the-ground climate action in 2015 and beyond.

For an increasing number of people from around the world, Monsanto today is the symbol of industrial agriculture. This chemical-intensive form of production pollutes the environment,

accelerates biodiversity loss, and massively contributes to global warming. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Monsanto, a US-based company, has developed a number of highly toxic products, which have permanently damaged the environment and caused illness or death for thousands of people.

#TribunalMonsanto

PARIS, Dec. 3, 2015 The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), IFOAM International Organics, Navdanya, Regeneration International (RI), and Millions Against Monsanto, joined by dozens of global food, farming and environmental justice groups announced today that they will send Monsanto MON (NYSE), a US-based transnational corporation, to a tribunal for crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide, in The Hague, Netherlands, next year on World Food Day, October 16, 2016.

The announcement was made at a press conference at the COP21 United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris.

ENVI objects to #GMO maize NK603 x T25 authorisation with 40 votes to 26 and 3 abstentions. Plenary vote January

https://twitter.com/EP_Environment

Environment MEPs oppose new GM maize authorization

ENVI Press release - Environment − 01-12-2015 - 16:52

The Commission should not authorise the use of glyphosate-tolerant GM maize NK603 x T25 in food and feed, says a resolution adopted by the environment committee on Tuesday. The Commission should suspend any authorisations for GM food and feed as long as the procedure, currently under review, has not been improved, say MEPs.

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Glyphosate tolerance

The committee also stresses that herbicide glyphosate, to which NK603 x T25 maize confers tolerance (along with the herbicide glufosinate ammonium), was classified as probably carcinogenic to humans on 20 March 2015 by the specialized cancer agency of the World Health Organization. The European Food Safety Authority said on 12 November that the herbicide was unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans.

Over 90 international scientists call German government report underpinning EFSA decision “not credible”

In November, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) concluded that glyphosate is “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans”.

The EFSA decision, based on the Renewal Assessment Report provided by the German federal risk assessment institute BfR, ran counter to the finding earlier this year by the international Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer arm of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. The IARC review linked glyphosate to dose-related increases in malignant tumours at multiple anatomical sites in experimental animals and to an increased incidence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in exposed humans.

In a new development, a group of over 90 independent scientists has written an open letter to the European Health and Food Safety Commissioner, Vytenis Andriukaitis, strongly challenging EFSA’s decision and the BfR report that it was based on.

In the EU, regulations have been devised to mandate the assessment of risks to the environmental, human food and animal feed safety arising from genetically modified organisms (GMOs). However, there is currently debate over whether, or which of, the new plant breeding techniques (NPBTs) under development would be classified as producing GMOs and whether any exemptions might apply. Here, we examine whether the NPBTs collectively termed “geneediting” techniques, i.e. oligonucleotide directed mutagenesis (ODM) and site-directed nuclease (SDN) techniques fall into the classification of a GMO within the EU. The grounds for any possible exemption of GM plants developed through cisgenesis from the EU GMO regulations are also discussed.

Production of strategic cotton crop falling alarmingly

The genetically modified ‘Bt’ cotton seed, introduced in Pakistan a decade ago to increase its vital cash crop to over 20 million bales by 2015, has done the opposite.

Agriculture experts and researchers report that this year’s production is four million bales short of the targeted 15 million bales. “Cotton production has declined continuously since 2005,” according to a Pakistan Agriculture Research Council (PARC) official.

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As some had warned, after two years of trials conducted by the multinational Biotech seed producing company, Monsanto, in different parts of the country, the imported Bt varieties failed to perform in the local environment.

And the exorbitant and unaffordable royalty demanded by Monsanto for technology transfer became an extra burden.

Only sustainable practices, with prevention coming first, will be able to feed the world, writes Henriette Christensen.

Henriette Christensen is senior policy advisor at PAN Europe, an anti-pesticides NGO.

PAN Europe has read EurActiv's special report Europe entering the era of precision farming and believes it is time to define what this term actually covers, and where it is useful.

While we fully recognise that there are aspects of precision farming which are useful (like weather forecasts and pest simulation programs), we are completely opposed to the argument that precision farming is the key to ensuring sustainability of agricultural production.

Modern technologies, covering smart phones and internet-linked programs, allow farmers to integrate weather forecasts and pest simulation programs the in every-day life of a farm, that were not available only a decade ago. Other such technologies are modern equipment like satellite navigation tools, GPSs etc., which help farmers to target spray better. Some even argue that with tools like GMOs, seed treatment may also be considered precision farming.

New Report Questions Risky Synthetic Biology Developments Promoted Under “Climate-Smart” Guise

Paris, 27th November 2015 – Some of the world’s largest agro-industrial corporations will be flying the flag for ‘climate-smart agriculture’ at the upcoming Climate Summit. They will claim that hi-tech crops and intensive industrial agriculture are needed to rescue farmers (and the hungry) from a warming world – a claim widely dismissed by peasant movements and civil society groups. A new report today from ETC Group and Heinrich Böll Foundation uncovers plans to use a clutch of extreme biotechnology approaches known as Synthetic Biology to move forward this industrial ‘climate-smart’ agenda. Extreme interventions range from trying to alter the way in which plants carry out photosynthesis to releasing ‘gene drives’ into the wild to alter natural populations of weeds.

Industrialized farming costs $3.33 trillion per year in environmental damage. We can remedy this by switching to agro-ecological farming practices such as organic agriculture. With the world awaiting an agreement from the upcoming COP21 climate conference in Paris, the organic food and farming movement calls for commitment to land-based mitigation measures that contribute to food security and tackle the root causes of climate change.

Producing the food we eat from farm to fork accounts for about half of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. When it comes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the agricultural sector is second only to the energy sector. To date climate negotiators and policy-makers have paid little attention to this fact. IFOAM - Organics International calls for a climate agreement recognizing the importance of the land sector and the start of a process developing clear and transparent principles to ensure actions taken on climate change are in accordance with social and ecological considerations. “Industrial farming is one of the major drivers of climate change, and business as usual is not an option, “ states André Leu, President of IFOAM - Organics International. “Only a transition to agroecology and organic farming can lead to deep cuts in emissions from food production”.