MALNUTRTION: Genetically Modified eggplant trials suspended in Philippines

Ma. Theresa V. Ilano test: 13 January 2011
 Workers uproot and bury experimental Bt eggplant: UP Mindanao/Rene Estremera

[CEBU, PHILIPPINES] Field trials of genetically modified (GM) eggplant have been suspended following a dispute at one of the trial sites that led local officials to uproot 3,000 plants.
Two of seven field trials of the plant — also known as Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) brinjal — were halted last month (29 December), two weeks after local authorities in Davao City uprooted plants because researchers had not fully complied with public consultation requirements.
Scientists had been hoping to complete the seven trials by the end of this year and commercialise Bt eggplant next year.
But research has now been delayed by at least six months, according to Eufemio Rasco Jr, lead researcher at the University of the Philippines Mindanao.
In the first incident, on 17 December, Sara Duterte-Carpio, Davao City Mayor, issued a cease-and-desist order to the university, and ordered the destruction of the plants, because scientists had failed to post a public information sheet about the trials at the City Hall, breaking rules governing the release of GM crops into the environment.
The Bureau of Plant Industry — the government agency that regulates GM field trials — then suspended the trial along with another one at Visayas State University, which had also failed fully to comply.
Merle Palacpac, chair of the bureau's Biotech Core Team, said the permit for both trials could be reinstated once all requirements were met.
Last-ditch efforts by the researchers and the bureau to prevent the uprooting failed.
Leonardo Avila III, Davao City agriculturist, said the researchers had ignored concerns raised by locals since September and had failed to reply to a letter from the mayor, supported by a resolution passed by the Davao City council in October, requesting that the trials meet stricter standards of confinement.
"We are not anti-GM. The problem is transparency. We just want to know what's happening. The Local Government Code clearly states that they should consult and explain the project to us," Avila said.
But Rasco said that his researchers have "clarified all issues directly and indirectly, in newspapers and public forums," and have tried to educate the public through two seminars on the risks and benefits of Bt eggplant.
"It was unjust," said Rasco. "The moral equivalent is putting a jaywalker before a firing squad. We were punished for a flimsy reason."
The university said it had "not violated any requirements that would impact on biosafety and public health". There was no danger of cross-pollination because the eggplant is a self-pollinated crop.
The Philippines was the first country in Asia to commercialise a GM crop — Bt corn — for food and animal feed. Bt eggplant was to be its second GM crop.
There is growing resistance to Bt eggplant in a city where an organic agriculture ordinance is in effect, and there is a strong anti-GM movement led by Greenpeace and local non-governmental organisation Go Organic Mindanao.
Bruce Chassy, associate director of the Biotechnology Center at the University of Illinois, United States, said he believes that anti-GM advocates may have poured their resources into the Philippines "because they fear the model the Philippines has set up may spread like a cancer and infect countries that now reject or are uncertain about GM crops.
"The Philippines has been a beacon of scientific enlightenment in a vast sea of darkness with regards to sound, science-based policies about agricultural biotechnology and GM crops. This poses an enormous threat to the movement against GM," he said.
India banned the planting of Bt eggplant last year, until the public and scientists are convinced of its safety, a fact that is often cited in other countries' anti-GM campaigns.
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/gm-eggplant-trials-suspended-in-philippines.html

MALNUTRITION: WikiLeaks: US targets EU over GM cropsUS embassy cable recommends drawing up list of countries for 'retaliation' over opposition to genetic modification

 John Vidal, environment editor guardian.co.uk,  3 January 2011

 Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

The US embassy in Paris wanted to penalise the EU after France moved to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety.
The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.
In response to moves by France to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety in late 2007, the ambassador, Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of former US president George Bush, asked Washington to penalise the EU and particularly countries which did not support the use of GM crops.
"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.
"The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices," said Stapleton, who with Bush co-owned the St Louis-based Texas Rangers baseball team in the 1990s.
In other newly released cables, US diplomats around the world are found to have pushed GM crops as a strategic government and commercial imperative.
Because many Catholic bishops in developing countries have been vehemently opposed to the controversial crops, the US applied particular pressure to the pope's advisers.
Cables from the US embassy in the Vatican show that the US believes the pope is broadly supportive of the crops after sustained lobbying of senior Holy See advisers, but regrets that he has not yet stated his support. The US state department special adviser on biotechnology as well as government biotech advisers based in Kenya lobbied Vatican insiders to persuade the pope to declare his backing. "… met with [US monsignor] Fr Michael Osborn of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, offering a chance to push the Vatican on biotech issues, and an opportunity for post to analyse the current state of play on biotech in the Vatican generally," says one cable in 2008.
"Opportunities exist to press the issue with the Vatican, and in turn to influence a wide segment of the population in Europe and the developing world," says another.
But in a setback, the US embassy found that its closest ally on GM, Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the powerful Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the man who mostly represents the pope at the United Nations, had withdrawn his support for the US.
"A Martino deputy told us recently that the cardinal had co-operated with embassy Vatican on biotech over the past two years in part to compensate for his vocal disapproval of the Iraq war and its aftermath – to keep relations with the USG [US government] smooth. According to our source, Martino no longer feels the need to take this approach," says the cable.
In addition, the cables show US diplomats working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto. "In response to recent urgent requests by [Spanish rural affairs ministry] state secretary Josep Puxeu and Monsanto, post requests renewed US government support of Spain's science-based agricultural biotechnology position through high-level US government intervention."
It also emerges that Spain and the US have worked closely together to persuade the EU not to strengthen biotechnology laws. In one cable, the embassy in Madrid writes: "If Spain falls, the rest of Europe will follow."
The cables show that not only did the Spanish government ask the US to keep pressure on Brussels but that the US knew in advance how Spain would vote, even before the Spanish biotech commission had reported.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/03/wikileaks-us-eu-gm-crops

MALNUTRITION: Sloppy seed-sorting main culprit in GM crop escapes

María Elena Hurtado: 17 December 2010


  Honey bees transmit GM pollen to non-GM fields, but human error plays a bigger role in GM contamination: Flickr/macropoulos

Careless handling of seeds may be the key reason for the unintended spread of genetically modified (GM) crops, a study has found.
The discovery challenges the widespread belief that the main source of GM contamination is the transfer of pollen by bees from GM crops to non-GM counterparts in neighbouring fields. Human error during seed production and handling is the more likely culprit, say the researchers.
Stands of non-GM crop plants are currently planted near or within fields of modified crops to provide refuges for pests. This technique helps prevent the pests developing resistance to the pesticides used on GM crops. But human error could undermine this widely used strategy, the paper says.
Shannon Heuberger, an entomologist at the University of Arizona, United States, and her colleagues measured the gene flow — the movement of genes between different populations that occurs when a plant from one population fertilises a plant from the other — in Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton, the widely planted GM crop, in 15 fields in Arizona.
They found that gene flow via the transmission of pollen by bees was rare. Fewer than one per cent of seeds produced by ordinary cotton plants contained genes from Bt cotton that had been transmitted in this way.
But poor seed-sorting resulted in some seed bags intended for planting in non-GM fields containing as much as 20 per cent GM seed. One non-GM field was found to have a large number of GM plants due to human error in planting.
"Our most important result is that growers can minimise gene flow by screening the seed before planting it in seed-production fields and by being more cautious in their planting process," Heuberger told SciDev.Net.
"In comparison, designing strategies to minimise bee pollination between fields can be quite difficult because insect behaviour is hard to predict," she added.
The study concludes that seed producers and decision makers should consider screening seeds to monitor the presence of GM seeds in the supply, and that they also need to communicate "the importance of segregating seed types at planting to reduce human error".
María Isabel Manzur, head of biodiversity at the Sustainable Societies Foundation (FSS), a Chilean environmental non-governmental organisation, said: "This is a very interesting study because it helps elucidate at a greater depth how transgenic contamination takes place".
"It corroborates once more that transgenic crops can contaminate surrounding crops, which is something that biotech companies frequently deny despite all the evidence to the contrary."
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/sloppy-seed-sorting-main-culprit-in-gm-crop-escapes.html

POVERTY: UN Cancun: The peasant view: 'They want to turn the air into a commodity'

John Vidal, environment editor guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 December 2010


 Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images: Peasants march in Cancún outside the UN climate change summit.
Cancún is this week a city of buses. Every day several hundred ferry 5,000 of the world's diplomats, businessmen and non-government groups to and from the centre of the burgeoning holiday city to the plush Moon Palace seaside resort 35km away from where the UN climate summit is being held.
Barely noticed, another 100 buses carrying almost 3,000 peasant farmers, indigenous people and social movements from 12 countries have arrived from all over Mexico and Latin America, converging in eight "caravans" on an old basketball court in one of the poorest parts of the city.
The groups of diplomats and peasants could not be more different. One pays up to $400 a night for hotel rooms overlooking a turquoise sea, the other earns in the region of $400 a year and camps on the concrete floor of the sports hall. Both claim to have solutions to the global climate crisis, but one eats lobster, the other beans.
Today, as the politicians got down to talks, the peasants marched peacefully in Cancún and rejected what they called the "false solutions" being proposed in the Moon Palace.
"What they are proposing is good only for capitalists. Capitalism has caused climate change and now it wants to make new business from it. They want to turn the air into a commodity. They want to put a price tag on everything," says Luis Gomes de Maura of the Brazilian landless workers' movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra. "These are false solutions to climate change."
"Cancún has been a hard experience for the peasants," says Paul Nicholson, a Basque co-ordinator of Via Campesina, the international movement of peasant farmers which organised Cancún's alternative climate conference. The meeting will be addressed by President Evo Morales of Bolivia on Thursday and possibly by other Latin American leaders later this week.
"The caravans on their way to Cancún visited environmental damage points across Mexico. They have seen face-to-face the impact of climate change, droughts, water pollution, giant hydro-electric dams, land-grabbing, big mining and rampant urbanisation," says Nicholson.
"Our caravan was 25 buses and we were stopped and searched five times by the army and the police. We had Mayan priests but they were not even allowed to hold ceremonies at ancient sites," says human rights activist and author Niels Barmeyer, who lives in central Mexico and travelled with the peasants to Cancún.
"People here have experienced climate crisis much more than people living in cities. They have had their farming devastated by the import of cheap GM maize and now it's just not worth them growing maize in many places now. People are leaving the fields and going to the US."
"Now they are threatened by conservation," says Barmeyer. "There is deep concern at moves in the climate summit to establish a forest protection scheme called Redd (reduced emissions from deforestation). This would allow rich countries to offset their climate emissions by better protecting forests.
"Countries are trying to sell conservation of the forest in the name of climate change, but it's a ruse. In fact they are taking forests over from ancestral land and declaring them biosphere conservation reserves. People are being denied access to land they have used for centuries or are having water denied them by conservation."
They reject carbon trading schemes, biofuel crops, geo-engineering and solutions proposed by the World Bank. "Peasant agriculture not only contributes positively to the carbon balance of the planet, it employs 2.8 billion people and remains the best way to combat malnutrition," says Josie Riffaud, a French farmer.
"Our message is that peasant agriculture can feed the world population and contribute to cooling down the planet. We small farmers and indigenous peoples are in grave danger. We will disappear if things continue like this. Who will feed people then? Industrial farming only leads to more hunger and climate change."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/07/cancun-climate-change-summit-peasants-march

MALNUTRITION: Scientists claim GM cowpea could generate US$1 billion

Busani Bafana
1 October 2010
The cowpea is emerging as an important food crop
[SALY, SENEGAL] A pest-resistant version of the black-eyed pea, a subspecies of the cowpea, is on track for commercial introduction, promising higher yields and claimed savings of up to US$1 billion on a crop that has found new popularity among African smallholders.
The cowpea, actually a bean, is rich in protein and is an important crop for both tackling malnutrition and adapting to climate change as it tolerates hot, dry conditions.
But infestation by the Maruca vitrata pod borer has cut the value of crops by up to US$300 million for smallholders in Africa, who produce nearly 5.2 million tonnes of the bean. The continent currently accounts for about 70 per cent of global production.
Now, scientists at the Institute for Agricultural Research (IAR) at Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria, in collaboration with other institutes including the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, Kenya, have engineered an insect-resistant Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cowpea that they say could be on shelves in six years.
The cowpea — an ancient African crop — has been making a comeback in recent years, with increased yields seen across Africa, delegates heard this week (27 September–1 October) at the 5th World Cowpea Conference in Dakar, Senegal.
"The cowpea is emerging as one of the most important food legumes because of its early maturity and its fit as a niche crop in multiple cropping systems," said B. B. Singh, an international cowpea breeder and visiting scientist at Texas A&M University in the United States.
He noted that there has already been a six-fold increase in world cowpea production in the last few decades, a "quiet revolution that is greater in magnitude than that of cereals and all other pulses".
Christian Fatokun, a cowpea breeder at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Nigeria, said that, as the crop is grown on a small scale by ill-resourced farmers, no commercial seed company will service this sector. And, because the cowpea is self-pollinating, companies also have little incentive to supply seeds.
The Bt cowpea will raise the status of the bean, claimed its developers. It could also generate up to US$1 billion by 2020 for farmers.
"Up until now, nobody in the scientific world was able to introduce resistance to this insect into cowpea," said Mohammad Faguji Ishiyaku, principal investigator of the Bt cowpea project and a researcher at the IAR.
"Our research will mean increased income by using less insecticide and increased productivity for areas growing cowpeas. Farmers will also have reduced exposure to harmful chemicals."
IITA agricultural economist, Ousmane Coulibaly, said surveys on cowpea in Nigeria, Benin, Mali and Burkina Faso have found that farmers are using a lot of expensive and sometimes harmful pesticides. In Nigeria — the largest producer and consumer of cowpea in Africa — net gains from not using pesticides could be about $500 million, he said.
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/scientists-claim-gm-cowpea-could-generate-us-1-billion.html

POVERTY: Why is feeding the hungry so controversial?

NEW YORK , 14 June 2010 (IRIN) - The US Senate is expected to pass the Global Food Security Act, new legislation that would significantly expand the government's commitment to combating hunger worldwide with a broad range of measures and more money, and a special coordinator, or "food czar", to oversee implementation of these provisions across agencies. A proposed new fund would allocate several billion dollars over five years to research and development, to enhance "food security, agriculture productivity, rural development, poverty and malnutrition alleviation, and environmental sustainability".The proposed fund would be "in addition, and complementary, to food aid provided through the US Department of Agriculture", most of which is not permitted to be purchased in the areas where a food crisis is occurring. The legislation would also establish a US Emergency Rapid Response to Food Crises Fund that would authorize a $500 million appropriation for "local and regional purchase and distribution of food" and "provision of emergency non-food assistance, including vouchers or cash transfer, safety net programmes, or other appropriate non-food assistance"."The US, indeed all global donors, have been starving agricultural research funding for more than a decade," said Christopher Barrett, a food aid expert who teaches at Cornell University. "A huge body of evidence demonstrates extremely high rates of return on agricultural investment ... in the form of poverty and hunger reduction globally and ... economic growth, including for US and other high-income country farmers who benefit ... from research aimed at stimulating agricultural development in poor countries," Barrett commented."It's a smarter way to approach hunger and development assistance," the ONE Campaign, a grassroots advocacy organization, said in a statement. "With targeted investments in solutions like proven farming techniques, seeds, improved soils and efficient use of water resources, we can not only end chronic hunger and food shortages, we can help poor farmers and their families earn their way out of poverty."However, some organizations have objected to a sentence in the bill sponsored by Senators Richard Lugar and Robert Casey, which mandates funding for "research on biotechnical advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including genetically modified [GM] technology". A letter signed by more than a hundred advocacy groups, scientists and development experts claimed that "The current language mandates one highly controversial type of technology - transgenics - dominated by two or three companies (most notably Monsanto), to get both taxpayer cash and ... favoured treatment under a bill ostensibly designed to help the poor and hungry," and asked that this section be stricken from the bill.If Congress "singles out one technology and attaches it to a pool of foreign aid money, the pressure on developing countries to ignore local priorities and other scientifically valid options - and to open their markets to that one technology - will be substantial", the letter noted.Annie Shattuck, of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, commented in an email to IRIN: "The bill puts needed resources to long-term agricultural development, but the essential question is: who will ultimately benefit from the development? She noted that "Both [the] State [Department] and USAID acknowledge that poverty, not scarcity, causes hunger, yet both focus on productivity and new green revolution technologies, to the exclusion of broader social factors like fairer trading arrangements, increasing the market power of small farmers, access to credit, stabilizing markets, rebuilding public extension, etc."Lugar responded: "The bottom line is that a provision of the Lugar-Casey bill directs US assistance in developing local technological solutions to advance agricultural productivity in countries suffering from chronic hunger - it does not require that these solutions be GM, but it does not preclude it where appropriate." He characterized as "gross misrepresentations" suggestions that "the bill would mandate that US assistance be used to promote genetically modified agricultural technologies, and that US food aid would be conditioned on recipient countries approving the use of GM products."Robert Paarlberg, author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa, told IRIN: "This is a deeper matter than GM crop research, since most of the organizations that oppose the Lugar-Casey bill on these grounds also oppose its emphasis on spreading more traditional science-based 'green revolution' farming technologies."He pointed out that "There is not yet an example of any society lifting its farming populations out of hunger and poverty without introducing green revolution methods, such as the use of improved seeds and nitrogen fertilizers," and that using only organic and agro-ecological approaches had not yet worked anywhere. "It simply makes sense to keep all our arrows available in the quiver in the battle to reduce hunger and poverty," said Christopher Barrett. "It would make no more sense to exclude research based on genetic modification than to focus on it exclusively." After passage in the senate, the bill will move on to the House of Representatives; once the lower house grants its approval, President Barack Obama's signature will make it law.

Kenya: importation genetically modified maize blocked

A shipment of genetically modified (GM) maize has been blocked at the Kenyan port of Mombasa after protests by environmentalists.
The cargo came from South Africa - whose maize exports mainly go to Kenya - and contained maize varieties developed by US multinational Monsanto.
Protestors claimed that safety checks had not been carried out on the maize and that it could contaminate the soil.
GM imports have been banned in several African countries.
The 40,000-tonne shipment contained four varieties of maize, three of which were made by Monsanto.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8609316.stm