Sirs,

I have recently been told that you do not have any control over the type of feed that is given to livestock which ends up on the shelves of supermarkets, and that much of that feed contains GM products, particularly soya and maize.  I am very concerned that I have ben unwittingly eating chicken, in particular, containing modified genes.

I consider it very dangerous to allow GM to enter the food chain in this way, and that you continue to support the growing of GM foods for animal feed in this way.

Scientists seem to be divided on the question of how this will affect us and I think it is disgusting that you are willing to support such a risk in the name of cheaper meat, presumably, and consider it your duty to put an end to this practice immediately.

I am not alone in this view and will do my utmost to inform people around me of what is happening.

I am told that both Marks and Spencer and Iceland are already committed to this and feel that at the moment I would be wise to change shops and go there instead, despite the money off offers and point collecting cards which you offer.

Yours sincerely,

See PANUPS updates service, for complete information.

Suicide Seeds on the Fast Track

"We've continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System [Terminator]. We never really slowed down. We're on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off."--Harry Collins, Delta & Pine Land Seed Co., January, 2000

A report released by the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) reveals that Terminator and Traitor technology are riding a fast track to commercialization. Terminator technology, the genetic engineering of plants to produce sterile seeds, is universally considered the most morally offensive application of agricultural biotechnology, since over 1.4 billion people depend on farm-saved seeds. Traitor technology, also known as genetic use restriction technology (GURTs), refers to the use of an external chemical to switch on or off a plant's genetic traits.

"After Monsanto and AstraZeneca publicly vowed not to commercialize terminator seeds in 1999, governments and civil society organizations were lulled into thinking that the crisis had passed. Nothing could be further from the truth," said RAFI's Executive Director Pat Mooney. "Despite mounting opposition from national governments and United Nations' agencies, research on Terminator and Traitor (genetic trait control) is moving full speed ahead."

According to RAFI, Delta & Pine Land, the world's largest cotton seed company is moving aggressively to commercialize Terminator. And despite massive protests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture supports and defends its anti-farmer patent and research on suicide seeds. Last year, AstraZeneca conducted field trials on genetic trait control technology (Traitor technology) in the UK. According to industry sources, it is not the first company to conduct field tests of this kind.

RAFI's report concludes that corporate commitments to disavow Terminator are virtually meaningless in light of the pace of corporate takeovers. Monsanto and AstraZeneca have each merged with other companies since they pledged not to commercialize suicide seeds.

* On December 2, 1999 Novartis and AstraZeneca announced they would spin-off and merge their agrochemical and seed divisions to create the world's biggest agribusiness corporation -- to be named "Syngenta."

* On December 19, 1999 Monsanto announced that it will merge with drug industry giant Pharmacia & Upjohn to create a new company, named Pharmacia, with combined annual sales of $17 billion.

The Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Jacques Diouf recently declared his opposition to Terminator. In publicly rejecting Terminator, FAO's Diouf has come to the defense of the 1.4 billion people who depend upon farm-saved seed for their survival.

Among the national governments that have announced their intention to oppose Terminator technology are Panama, India, Ghana, and Uganda. India, one of the first governments to publicly reject Terminator, explicitly prohibits Terminator genes in a draft bill now before the Indian Parliament. Ghanaian Minister of Environment, Cletus Avoka, says that his government will not tolerate the use of Terminator technology. Panama's Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries writes that his government "will adopt measures to prohibit the specific patents as well as the technology in general." Ugandan officials have said that their government is discussing measures to outlaw Terminator at the highest levels of government.

Terminator and Traitor technologies are not limited to a single patent, nor is the research confined to one or two companies. Delta & Pine Land is currently the high-profile crusader for Terminator, but the goal of genetic trait control is industry-wide. According to RAFI, over 30 patents are collectively held by the multinational agrochemical firms that dominate the field of biotechnology.

According to RAFI, the future of Terminator/Traitor Technology rests with national governments and multinational corporations. The pressure points for political action are, first and foremost, with national governments around the world. Second, pressure should be applied at key international fora such as through the BioSafety Protocol at the Convention on Biological Diversity, and intellectual property negotiations at the World Trade Organization.

Entitled "Suicide Seeds on the Fast Track," the new RAFI Communiqu is available on RAFI's Web site http://www.rafi.org.

Source/contact: RAFI International Office, 110 Osborne Street, Suite 202, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3L 1Y5 Canada; phone (204) 453-5259; fax (204) 925-8034; email rafi@rafi.org.

Corporate Watch have just produced an in-depth briefing on Aventis available for 40p. Issue 10 of Corporate Watch is out now with articles on how New Labours modernisation of the planning system is skewed in the interest of developers, Countryside Residential & Hockley, the Campaign for Planning Sanity, how supermarkets destroy jobs + a whole lot more. Essential. 3/2 from Corporate Watch, 16b Cherwell Street, Oxford OX4 1BG, tel 01865 791 391 www.corporatewatch.org

Info from Schnews:

Aventis Crop Science have become the chief cheerleader of genetic engineering and are behind nearly half of the trials announced so far. Never heard of Aventis? Thats because like our old friends Monsanto they have recently modified their name (see SchNEWS 246). Last year they were AgrEvo, at the end of the year they merged with pharmaceutical giants Rhone-Poulenc to form Aventis. The result - the worlds largest life sciences company. AgrEvo were behind all of the farm scale trials last year and have managed to become very cosy with New Labour. Last year Friends of the Earth forced the Government to back down after Government/AgrEvo collusion on farm scale trials was found to be illegal by the High Court. In 1998 they were named and shamed by the Government for failing to comply with certain conditions for GMO tests. Despite this, two of its employees were appointed by the government to independently supervise Aventiss farm scale trials. Last year, faced with direct action against their crops, AgrEvo, as well as Monsanto went to the courts to get an injunction against six genetix snowball activists ( Sch 184). Aventis is now lobbying, along with their biotech mates to have the location of test sites kept secret. Give em a call on 01277 301 301.

BY GEORGE MONBIOT

I've always been a little uncomfortable about the term "Frankenstein food". It smacks of both sensationalism and trivialisation. In politics, as in shopping, the cheaper the device, the less likely it is to last. But the label is becoming ever more germane. For not only are GM crops cobbled together out of bits of other organisms, but they have also begun to demonstrate a ghoulish ability to rise from the dead, given a sufficient application of power.

A year ago, the biotech companies' grave had been dug. They had failed repeatedly to refute the three principal arguments against deployment: that GM crops enhance corporate power by allowing companies to patent the food chain; that the long-term safety tests to establish whether or not they pose a risk to human health have never been conducted; and that consumers don't want to buy them. The companies might bluster about children in the developing world turning blind if we don't eat up our GM cornflakes in Europe, but there's no shortage of evidence to suggest that corporate control of the food chain has devastating effects on nutrition. But, though we have won the argument, we are losing the war. For the GM companies have rediscovered the old way of dealing with reluctant customers: if persuasion doesn't work, use force.

The new opium wars are being waged in the fields of North America, where many farmers are beginning to shy away from engineered seed. GM crops, they have found, are harder to sell. There is evidence that some varieties yield less while requiring more herbicide. But farmers are swiftly coming to see that the costs of not planting GM seed can greatly outweigh the costs of planting it.

Last month, lawyers warned a farming family in Indiana that the only way they could avoid being sued by the biotech company Monsanto was to sow their entire farm with the company's seeds. Two years ago, the Roushes planted just over a quarter of their fields with the company's herbicide-resistant soya. Though they recorded precisely what they planted where, and though an independent crop scientist has confirmed their account, Monsanto refuses to accept that the Roushes did not deploy its crops more widely. It is now demanding punitive damages for the use of seeds they swear they never sowed. The Roushes maintain that they are, in effect, being sued for not buying the company's products. So next year, like hundreds of other frightened farmers, they will plant their fields only with Monsanto's GM seeds. Like the opium forced upon a reluctant China by British gunboats, once you've started using GM, you're stuck with it.

But the solution proposed by the Roushes' lawyers was a prudent one. In April, a Canadian farmer called Percy Schmeiser was forced to pay Monsanto Dollars 85,000, after a court ruled that he had stolen Monsanto's genetic material. Schmeiser maintained that the thinly- spread GM rape plants on his farm were the result of pollen contamination from his neighbour's fields, and he had done all he could to get rid of them. But Monsanto's proprietary genes had been found on his land whether he wanted them or not. Following the time- honoured convention that the polluted pays, Mr Schmeiser was forced to compensate the company for what he insists was invasion by its vegetable vermin.

Where the courts won't enforce compliance, governments will. In 10 days' time, Sri Lanka will introduce a five-year ban on genetically engineered crops, while scientists seek to determine whether or not they are safe. The United States, worried that thorough testing could destroy the value of its biotech companies, has threatened to report the ban to the World Trade Organisation.

In Britain, the Welsh Assembly voted unanimously that Wales should be a GM-free zone. But the Westminster government has ignored the ruling and licensed trials of Aventis's genetically modified maize there. The trials are supposed to determine whether or not the new variety is safe to plant. But Aventis has already received consent to grow it commercially, even if the "experiments" show that planting is an ecological disaster. Welsh activists suggest that the purpose of the trials is to lend credibility to a done deal.

Monsanto will never repeat the mistake of seeking to persuade consumers that they might wish to purchase its products. In future, it won't have to. Like the other biotech companies, it has been buying up seed merchants throughout the developing world. In some places farmers must either purchase GM seeds -and the expensive patent herbicides required to grow them - or plant nothing at all.

The European environment commissioner Margot Wallstrom warned in March that the EU could be sued by biotech firms if it upheld its ban on the sale of new GM foods. "We cannot afford," she explained, "to lose more years of not aiding the biotechnology industry". Biotech companies have been pressing to raise Europe's legal limit for the contamination of conventional crops with modified genes: in time, they hope, genetic pollution will ensure that there is so little difference between GM and "non-GM" food that consumers will give up and accept their products. The US government has begun pressing for a worldwide ban on the labelling of GM food, to ensure that consumers have no means of knowing what they're eating.

The monster has begun to walk. The technology which, we were promised, would broaden consumer choice, is becoming compulsory. This is the free trade which George Bush and Tony Blair have promised to the world. It is the freedom which, they have assured us, will overthrow vested interests, challenge market concentration, enhance competition and empower consumers.

It is the freedom we must be forced to swallow.

When protesters against this forced emancipation were arrested by the freedom-loving police in Genoa, some of them were tortured, then shown a photograph of Mussolini. They were obliged to salute it and shout "Viva il Duce!" Presumably because this enthusiastic defence of market forces is compatible with free trade, neither Tony Blair nor Jack Straw saw fit to complain. Had they done so, they would have spoken to one of the most senior members of Italy's borderline-fascist government, the foreign minister Renato Ruggiero. Before becoming a minister, he was director-general of the World Trade Organisation, the body responsible for enforcing free trade.

Mr Ruggiero has not changed his politics: he has long upheld the right of the strong to trample the weak, of corporate power to crush human rights. The organisation he ran has now chosen as the venue for its next summit meeting one of the most repressive nations in the rich world. In November, WTO delegates will be discussing freedom in Qatar, safe in the unassailable fortress of a country which tolerates no dissent. This is the force behind market forces.

It has become fashionable of late to claim that we can buy our way out of trouble: that through the judicious use of shares and shopping we can force companies to change the way they trade. But it is surely not hard to see that consumer choice is an inadequate means of curbing corporate power.

Trapped inside PFI hospitals or sponsored schools, forced through lack of choice to buy cars, shop at superstores and eat GM food, we cannot escape the coercion which facilitates free trade. If market forces operate outside the market, then so must we.

---

We do not need GM!

GM Test Sites

To find out if there are GM test sites near you then click on this link

also:

http://www.geneticsaction.org.uk/testsites - This site includes information about damage done to the crops from activists.

http://www.dtlr.gov.uk/MOVED-environment.htm - Why not get it from the horses mouth?