Guy Kastler: FAO should support seed selection by peasants and small scale farmers
by La Vía Campesina
Guy Kastler: FAO should support seed selection by peasants and small
scale farmers [1]
Published on Tuesday, 16 February 2016 18:18
THE FAO SHOULD SUPPORT SEED SELECTION BY PEASANTS AND SMALL-SCALE
FARMERS, AND IT SHOULD CONDEMN THE CONFISCATION OF CULTIVATED
BIODIVERSITY THROUGH GENE PATENTING
_ [2]La Via Campesina, Guy Kastler_
It was to be expected that, in order to discuss the subject of
biotechnology, the FAO would call upon those who are using biotechnology
in research and in industry. However, what was definitely not to be
expected was for the FAO, in conducting its discussions on public policy
and food policy, to turn almost exclusively to these same actors, while
at the same time a very large number of peasant, small-scale farmer, and
civil society organisations that are opposed to the uncontrolled
development of biotechnology have not been invited to speak - or only in
a very marginal way through the invitation that was sent to me. The
organisations in question have released a public statement that I am
asking you to take into consideration.
Genetically-modified plants have not fulfilled their promises. The
majority of them have been modified so as to be tolerant to herbicides.
They have led to the rapid appearance of herbicide-resistant
adventitious weeds, to an exponential rise in the use of ever more toxic
herbicides, and, in turn, to serious harm to public health and to the
environment. Peasant farmers and rural area residents and their families
are the first victims of these negative effects. The other large class
of genetically-modified plants produces insecticidal substances that
lead to insects' becoming resistant - and thus to an already programmed
agronomic failure. Here again, the first victims are the peasants and
small-scale farmers who have lost their harvests, often despite
additional use of toxic chemical insecticides. The genetic technologies
used to produce these plants have caused numerous unintended and
unforeseen effects that industry is desperately trying to hide. The most
visible of these effects have been the loss of harvests and the decline
in the quality of crops. Thus, the Burkina Faso cotton sector lost its
place in the market, which it had won with much effort and which was
based on the quality of its cotton fibre; with the switch to GMOs there
was a drastic decline in quality. What good is it to increase yields if
the harvest is unsaleable. Here, once more, peasants and small-scale
farmers are the first to suffer, whereas the corporations that are
responsible for such catastrophes simply say that they are unable to
explain what happened.
Genetically-modified seeds will always be of no importance for food
security. Their purchase cost and the cost of the inputs that are
indispensable for their cultivation limits their use to the only markets
in which they are affordable: the production of industrially-farmed
crops for animal feed in the rich countries, for agro-fuels, and for the
emerging biomass economy - which is taking over agricultural land for
non-food uses. Industry is not interested in the food crops that provide
three quarters of the world's available food. The peasants and
small-scale farmers who produce this food do not have enough money to
buy GMOs and the inputs indispensable to their cultivation. GMOs are
only a means of taking over their farmland so as to replace their food
crops by the industrial monoculture of agro-exports.
Every time genetically-modified plants are approved, the immense
biodiversity of cultivated plants resulting from many centuries of
selection by peasants and small-scale farmers is replaced by a few
patented varieties. When pollen and seeds are moved by wind, by insects,
or by farm equipment, patented genes are carried from one field to
another. They contaminate peasant seeds, which are then considered as
infringements of industry's patented varieties. That is how, in the
United States, in less than 20 years, a point has been reached where
patented GMOs represent 89% of the maize and 94% of the soya that is
planted. The prohibition against farmers' reusing their own harvested
seeds, as well as constituting a violation of their rights, also
prevents them from adapting their crops to climate change. Climate
change is not linear. At the moment when the seeds are planted, nobody
knows what that year's weather is going to be like. Genes that are
resistant to drought are useless in years when there are tornados or
exceptional floods, and vice versa. The resilience of our crops in the
face of the increasing violence of climate shocks, depends above all on
their genetic diversity and on their adaptation to their local areas -
and not on this or that new gene that has been patented in a laboratory.
Only the selections made by peasants and small-scale farmers in their
fields, from seeds that have been harvested locally, can foster such an
adaptation; without them, there can be no real solution. The patents
that accompany all GMOs are a false solution because they prohibit seed
selection by peasants and small-scale farmers.
Confronted with the rejection of GMOs by a large number of consumers,
industry has invented new genetic modification techniques which it wants
to have exempted from GMO regulations. These genetic engineering
techniques consist of modifying the genes of plant cells that are grown
in vitro. There is no possible question that they produce modified
living organisms as included in the definition in the Cartagena
Protocol. But, on the pretext that some of these techniques do not leave
visible traces, in the plants that are finally sold on the market, of
the genetic material that was introduced into the plant cells in order
to modify their genome, industry wants these plants not to be classified
as GMOs - so as to avoid both the international rules of the Cartagena
Protocol and the labelling, evaluation, and follow-up requirements that
are part of many national regulatory systems. In order to bring this
about, industry is trying to limit the definition of GMOs so that it
only applies to the insertion of recombinant DNA that can be found in
the final product. It is inadmissible that the FAO, in its own
publications, has taken up, and given credibility to, this flagrant
violation of the only recognised international definition of GMOs given
by the Cartagena Protocol.
This new manoeuvre is all the more perverse because it allows industry
to patent genes without distinguishing them from genes existing
naturally in the seeds of peasants and small-scale farmers and in seed
banks. In this way, the whole of available cultivated biodiversity comes
under the control of the handful of multinationals holding the largest
patent portfolios. Peasants and small-scale farmers and small seed
selectors can no longer find out - in order to protect themselves -
whether or not the seeds that they are using contain patented genes.
This legal insecurity is leading to an acceleration of the extreme
concentration of the seed industry that allows three multinationals to
control more than half of today's world seed trade. It is also leading
to the disappearance of the immense diversity of peasant seeds that are
saved and renewed year after year by peasants and small-scale farmers in
their fields. In order to contribute to this new biopiracy, the Divseek
programme is making freely available information on the genetic
sequences of all of the plant resources in the ITPGRFA's Multilateral
System. In so doing, it is violating the obligations of prior consent
and benefit sharing. ITPGRFA's complicity in collaborating with this
programme is an unacceptable betrayal of the trust of millions of
peasants and small-scale farmers who have entrusted it with their seeds.
La Via Campesina and allied civil society organisations expect the FAO
to put an immediate end to this new biopiracy and to any type of support
for genetic modification technologies, the only purpose of which is to
allow a handful of multinationals to take over and to patent the
entirety of existing cultivated biodiversity. The FAO should support the
peasants and small-scale farmers organisations and the researchers that
are involved in collaborative peasant seed selection programmes which
strengthen food sovereignty and peasant agroecology.
Links:
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[1]
http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/biodiversity...
[2] http://viacampesina.org/en/images/2016-02-16-Guy%20FAO.jpg
8 years, 10 months
Corporate vision of the future of food promoted at the UN: More than 100 civil society organizations raise alarm about FAO biotechnology meeting
by La Vía Campesina
Corporate vision of the future of food promoted at the UN [1]
Published on Monday, 15 February 2016 10:37
PRESS RELEASE – LA VIA CAMPESINA, ETC AND GRAIN
_ [2]_
_More than 100 civil society organizations raise alarm about FAO
biotechnology meeting_
(Rome, Monday 15 February, 2016) Just when the biotech companies that
make transgenic seeds are merging, the corporate vision of biotechnology
is showing up at FAO. At today's opening of the three-day International
symposium on agricultural biotechnologies convened by the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome, more than
100 civil society and social movement and organizations (CSOs) from four
continents have issued a statement [3] denouncing both the substance and
structure of the meeting, which appears to be another attempt by
multinational agribusiness to redirect the policies of the UN agency
toward support for Genetically-engineered crops and livestock.
The global peasant and family farm movement, La Via Campesina, invited
CSOs to sign the letter when the symposium's agenda became public. Two
of the FAO keynote speakers are known proponents of GMOs, and the agenda
and side events over the three days include speakers from the
Biotechnology Industry Organization (a biotech trade group in the USA),
Crop Life International (the global agrochemical trade association),
DuPont (one of the world's largest biotech seed companies) and CEVA (a
major veterinary medicine corporation), among others. FAO has only
invited one speaker or panellist openly critical of GMOs. Worse, one of
the two speakers at the opening session is a former assistant director
general of FAO who has pushed for so-called Terminator seeds (GMO seeds
programmed to die at harvest time forcing farmers to purchase new seeds
every growing season), in opposition to FAO's own public statements. The
second keynoter's speech is titled, "Toward Ending the Misplaced Global
Debate on Biotechnology" - suggesting that the FAO symposium should be
the moment for shutting down biotech criticism.
In convening the biased symposium, FAO is bowing to industry pressure
that intensified following international meetings on agroecology hosted
by FAO in 2014 and 2015. The agroecology meetings were a model of
openness to all viewpoints, from peasants to industry. But the biotech
industry apparently prefers now to have a meeting they can control. This
is not the first time FAO has been drawn into this game. In 2010, FAO
convened a biotechnology conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, that blocked
farmers from its organizing committee, and then tried to prevent their
attendance at the conference itself.
"We are alarmed that FAO is once again fronting for the same
corporations, just when these companies are talking about further
mergers amongst themselves, which would concentrate the commercial seeds
sector in even fewer hands" the CSO statement denounces.
It is clear, according to the Civil Society Statement, that industry
wants to use FAO to re-launch their false message that genetically
engineered crops can feed the world and cool the planet, while the
reality is that nothing has changed on the biotech front. GMOs don't
feed people, they are mostly planted in a handful of countries on
industrial plantations for agrofuels and animal feed, they increase
pesticide use, and they throw farmers off the land. Transnational
biotech companies are trying to patent the planet's bodiversity, which
shows that their main interest is to make enormous profits, and not to
guarantee food security or food sovereignty. The industrial food system
that these companies promote is also one of the main drivers of climate
change. Confronted with the rejection of GMOs by many consumers and
producers, the industry is now inventing new and possibly dangerous
breeding techniques to genetically modify plants, without calling them
GMOs. In doing so, they are trying to avoid current GMO regulations and
trick consumers and farmers.
The agroecology activities were much closer to the way that FAO should
act, the Statement points out, "as a centre for knowledge exchange,
without a hidden agenda on behalf of a few." Why does FAO now limit
itself again to corporate biotechnology and deny the existence of
peasant technologies? FAO should support the peasant technologies, that
offer the most innovative, open source, and the effective pathway to
ending hunger and malnutrition. It is time to stop pushing a narrow
corporate agenda, says Civil Society. "The vast majority of the world's
farmers are peasants, and it is peasants who feed the world. We need
peasant-based technologies, not corporate biotechnologies."
"It is high time that FAO puts an end to biopiracy and to its support
for genetically modified crops, which only serve to allow a handful of
transnational companies to patent and to grab all the existing
biodiversity," said La Via Campesina leader Guy Kastler. "On the
contrary, FAO should support farmers' organisations and researchers
engaged in collaborative plant breeding in the service of food
sovereignty and peasant agroecology".
The statement and the list of signatories can be downloaded here:
http://goo.gl/mjaZor [3]
_Media contacts in Rome:_
Guy Kastler and other Via Campesina leaders
Phone numbers: + 39 329 665 53 44 and +39 331 188 64 35
E-mail: lvcweb(a)viacampesina.org
Links:
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[1]
http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/biodiversity...
[2] http://viacampesina.org/en/images/2016-02-15-ETC-GRAIN-LVC.jpg
[3] http://goo.gl/mjaZor
8 years, 10 months
Dairy Crisis: Enough evaluations, it’s high time for the Commission to act
by La Vía Campesina
Dairy Crisis: Enough evaluations, it's high time for the Commission to
act [1]
Published on Wednesday, 03 February 2016 19:47
[2]PRESS RELEASE
Brussels, 2 February 2016
At the height of a crisis that has ruined thousands of dairy producers
across Europe, the European Commission has once again chose to delay
action, and opted for its usual practice of consultations, evaluations
and studies.
Claiming it is part of a larger effort to improve existing legislation,
the EC has recently sent out a questionnaire to producer and
agricultural organisations, alleging that by inquiring on the benefits
and difficulties of the "Milk Package", the survey will improve its
implementation in the field.
ECVC believes that the current crisis of the milk sector and the
desperate situation of milk producers demands measures that are well
beyond the European Commission's conventional procedures of postponing
decisions due to further studies, evaluations and the convening of
experts to analyse what is clear to everyone: the complete failure of
the measures contained in the "Milk Package".
To assess the functioning of the "Milk Package" one only has to look out
the window and behold the ruin of thousands of producers across the
European Union and the disappearance of milk production in several
regions, facts that have been pointed out by many sectorial
organizations, including ECVC, after the High Level Group presented its
recommendations.
By favoring these narrow studies and evaluations, the European
Commission, refuses to question its wrong assumptions that market
volatility is inevitable and that the problem lies in the organizational
model of production. What's more, it effectively closes the debate to
other solutions, such as the restoring of an effective public instrument
of production control that, among other things, assures the continuity
of dairy farms - based on sustainable models- in all European
territories.
ECVC believes that it's high time to conclude and recognize, not to
carry out further studies; not evaluate, but to take action for
efficient tools of public regulations in order to maintain decent prices
and fair incomes for dairy farmers, as well as to allow the control and
adjustment of European production.
_Contacts :_
Isabel Vilalba: (0034) 608905444 (ES)
Jose -Miguel Pacheco: (0035) 1918736441 (PT, ES)
Genevieve Savigny: (0033) 625551687 (EN, FR)
Links:
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[1]
http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/sustainable-...
[2] http://viacampesina.org/en/images/2016-02-03-EU%20Milk%20Crisis.jpg
8 years, 11 months
