Friday, November 27, 2015

Seralini’s team wins defamation and forgery court cases on GMO and pesticide research

On 25 November 2015, the High Court of Paris indicted Marc Fellous, former chairman of France’s Biomolecular Engineering Commission, for “forgery” and “the use of forgery”, in a libel trial that he lost to Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini. The Biomolecular Engineering Commission has authorised many GM crops for consumption.
The details of the case have not yet been publicly released but a source close to the case told GMWatch that Fellous had used or copied the signature of a scientist without his agreement to argue that Séralini and his co-researchers were wrong in their reassessment of Monsanto studies.

The Séralini team’s re-assessment reported finding signs of toxicity in the raw data from Monsanto’s own rat feeding studies with GM maize.  

The sentence against Fellous has not yet been passed and is expected in June 2016.

Defamation case

The latest ruling marks a second court victory for Séralini’s team.

In September 2012, an article written by Jean-Claude Jaillette in Marianne magazine said that “researchers around the world” had voiced “harsh words” about the research of Séralini and his team on the toxic effects of a GMO and Roundup over a long term period – research that was supported by the independent organisation CRIIGEN. The journalist wrote of a “scientific fraud in which the methodology served to reinforce pre-determined results”.

Séralini, his team, and CRIIGEN challenged this allegation in a defamation lawsuit. They were assisted by the notaries Bernard Dartevelle and Cindy Gay.

On 6 November 2015, after a criminal investigation lasting three years, the 17th Criminal Chamber of the High Court of Paris passed sentence. Marianne magazine and its journalist were fined for public defamation of a public official and public defamation of the researchers and of CRIIGEN, which is chaired by Dr Joel Spiroux de Vendômois.

The trial demonstrated that the original author of the fraud accusation, prior to Marianne, was the American lobbyist Henry I. Miller in Forbes magazine.

Miller had previously lobbied to discredit research linking tobacco to cancer and heart disease on behalf of the tobacco industry. Since then he has tried to do the same in support of GMOs and pesticides, through defamation.

The long-term toxicity study by Séralini’s team was republished after the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology retracted it under pressure from lobbyists. Séralini’s team has just published a summary of the toxic effects of Roundup below regulatory thresholds.

Appeal for funding for CRIIGEN

These court actions have taken up an enormous amount of energy and funds. CRIIGEN cannot survive without public support.

This is why the CRIIGEN team is making a call for donations to support past and future legal cases and independent research:
https://www.leetchi.com/c/solidarite-de-le-criigen–association-du-pr-seralini

SOURCE : http://www.gmoseralini.org/seralinis-team-wins-defamation-and-forgery-court-cases-on-gmo-and-pesticide-research/

Friday, November 6, 2015

NEWS: Bt cotton turns out to be a disaster for Indian farmers

Last updated on: November 06, 2015 17:57 IST
 
The whitefly outbreak has intensified a debate over GM crops just as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's office reviews a proposal to allow farmers to grow GM mustard.


Image: Bhinder Kaur, widow of Kuldeep Singh, a cotton farmer who committed suicide in Bhatinda, Punjab. Photograph: Munish Sharma/Reuters

Indian farmers are for the first time abandoning genetically modified cotton after a devastating pest attack ravaged their fields, sowing doubts about the crop technology that had been hailed as a panacea.

The whitefly attack on the Bt cotton variety in Punjab and Haryana has caused a rural crisis: at least three farmers have committed suicide around the city of Bhatinda and tens of thousands protested to demand state aid.

These are some of the same farmers who more than a decade ago reaped the first bumper harvest of GM cotton that quickly caught on because it dramatically increased yields and raised living standards.

Cotton output has jumped fourfold since commercial cultivation of GM cotton was allowed in 2002, transforming India into the world's top producer and second-largest exporter.
That run may now falter, raising the risk of slower sales for Monsanto which has sold Bt cotton seeds to more than 7 million Indian farmers, mainly through local seed firms operating under licence.


Image: Farmer Darshan Singh plucks cotton from his damaged Bt cotton field on the outskirts of Bhatinda in Punjab. Photograph: Munish Sharma/Reuters

"We poured all our money into buying pesticides and worked day and night to save the crop. But it failed miserably," said Thana Singh, 67, whose son died after taking poison during a protest outside a government office in Punjab.

Singh and many other farmers plan to switch to food crops such as lentils to rebuild their livelihoods.
"My son was unable to overcome the stress. We were staring at massive losses caused either by the Bt cotton seeds, or maybe by fake pesticides," said Singh, who choked up with emotion as he walked through a field whose cotton pods and leaves were covered with whiteflies. "I don't want to touch Bt seeds until I have a firm answer."

The whitefly outbreak has intensified a debate over GM crops just as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's office reviews a proposal to allow farmers to grow GM mustard, an oilseed.
To lift India's woeful farm productivity, Modi has asked scientists to work closely with farmers to introduce high-yielding crop strains.

But a farmers' body affiliated to Modi's ruling party is bitterly opposing GM crops and is lobbying senior officials for a ban on Bt cotton and to block GM mustard.


Image: Malkit Kaur, mother of Kuldeep Singh, a cotton farmer who committed suicide, holds his portrait as Kuldeep's father Thana Singh (R), his brother Hardeep Singh (2nd R) and his widow Bhinder Kaur. Photograph: Munish Sharma/Reuters

High stakes
The stakes are high for Monsanto, which licensed a gene that produces its own pesticide to kill bollworms, the pest most lethal to cotton, to a number of local seed companies in lieu of royalties.
Monsanto also markets these seeds directly, but has a market share of just 2-3 percent. The local licensees together command 90 percent of the market.

Mahyco Monsanto Biotech (India) Pvt Ltd (MMB), a joint venture with India's Mahyco, said that Monsanto and the licensees have marketed their product as resistant to bollworms, but not against other pests.

"This technology is effective only against specific types of bollworms that are known to cause boll damage leading to yield loss and economic damage to the cotton crop and not other sucking pests," a spokesman said in comments emailed to Reuters.


Image: Jaswinder Kaur, a farmer, removes whitefly pest from cotton pods after plucking them from her damaged Bt cotton field. Photograph: Munish Sharma/Reuters

Spurious Seeds, Phoney Pesticides?
Punjab and Haryana have launched investigations, raiding the offices of some seed companies and pesticide makers to collect samples of the products sold to farmers.

Last month, police arrested the director of the Punjab state agriculture university suspected of involvement in allowing the sale of 19 pesticides that were found be ineffective.

The federal farm ministry said it was considering ways to limit the number of GM cotton hybrids being widely sold in India to eliminate those most prone to whitefly.

Experts say that dry conditions in northern India and Pakistan have helped the pest spread.
"Bt cotton seeds are as effective against bollworms as they were in 2002 and the widespread whitefly attack was primarily due to a prolonged dry spell," said Bhagirath Choudhary, director of the South Asia Biotech Centre, a not-for-profit scientific society.

Farmers grow GM cotton on 95 percent of the total 11-12 million hectares under the crop. Punjab and Haryana together produce about 4 million bales (1 bale = 170 kg) of India's total output of nearly 38 million bales.

"I don't see any significant drop in output because we haven't heard of any pest attack in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh," Choudhary said, referring to the top producing states.

(Additional reporting by Rajendra Jadhav and Krishna N Das)

Thursday, November 5, 2015

REPORT : Twenty Years of Failure - Why GM crops have failed to deliver on their promises

Greenpeace Publication - 5 November, 2015

Twenty years ago, the first genetically modified (GM) crops were planted in the USA, alongside dazzling promises about this new technology. Two decades on, the promises are getting bigger and bigger, but GM crops are not delivering any of them. Not only was this technology supposed to make food and agriculture systems simpler, safer and more efficient, but GM crops are increasingly being touted as the key to 'feeding the world' and 'fighting climate change'.
The promises may be growing, but the popularity of GM crops is not. Despite twenty years of pro-GM marketing by powerful industry lobbies, GM technology has only been taken up by a handful of countries, for a handful of crops. GM crops are grown on only 3% of global agricultural land. Figures from the GM industry in fact show that only five countries account for 90% of global GM cropland, and nearly 100% of these GM crops are one of two kinds: herbicide-tolerant or pesticide-producing. Meanwhile, whole regions of the world have resisted GM crops. European consumers do not consume GM foods, and a single type of GM maize is cultivated in Europe. Most of Asia is GM-free, with the GM acreage in India and China mostly accounted for by a non-food crop: cotton. Only three countries in Africa grow any GM crops. Put simply, GM crops are not 'feeding the world'.
Why have GM crops failed to be the popular success the industry claims them to be?
 
LINK TO THE REPORT Twenty Years of Failure
 
SOURCE:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Agriculture/Twenty-Years-of-Failure/

Sunday, November 1, 2015

GM MUSTARD SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN INDIA: THIS IS UNNEEDED, UNWANTED & UNSAFE

New Delhi, November 1st 2015: Following a news report confirming that an application for approval for commercialization of GM mustard has been moved with the apex regulatory body GEAC (Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee in the Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change), the Coalition for a GM Free India reminded the government about the serious consequences of this GMO's release, and warned the government of serious resistance all over the countryFarmer Unions and citizen groups had earlier started a Sarson Satyagraha urging the government not to jeopardise our food, farming and environment by introducing GM mustard.
This is the first time India would be considering commercial cultivation approval of any GM food crop after an indefinite moratorium was placed on Bt brinjal five years ago in February 2010. This GM mustard, developed by Delhi University, called Dhara Mustard Hybrid 11 (DMH11) adopted the transgenic technology to facilitate hybridization on claims of increased yields through such a hybrid. In creating such a GM mustard, male sterility has been induced in one of the parental lines, in addition to using herbicide tolerance trait.
Rajesh Krishnan, Convenor of Coalition for a GM-Free India pointed out that this GM mustard hybrid has been created mainly to facilitate the seed production work of seed manufacturers whereas farmers already have a choice of non-GM mustard hybrids in the market, in addition to high yielding mustard varieties. More importantly, there are non-GM agro-ecological options like System of Mustard Intensification yielding far higher production than the claimed yields of this GM mustard of DU. He said, “this GM mustard is also a backdoor entry for various other GM crops in the regulatory pipeline – while herbicide tolerance as a trait has been recommended against by committee after committee in the executive, legislative and judiciary-based inquiry processes in India related to GM crops, this GM mustard uses herbicide tolerance. Contamination is inevitable of all other mustard varieties, while India is the Centre of Diversity for mustard. This is clearly one more GMO that is unwanted and unneeded and is being thrust on citizens in violation of our right to choices, as farmers and consumers”. He also reminded that most state governments were not even willing to take up field trials of this GM mustard and only Punjab and Delhi had allowed the same.
“GEAC is functioning in a highly secretive fashion, and while the nation does not know what is happening inside the regulatory institutions with applications like this GM mustard, biosafety data is being repeatedly declined by the regulators. What are the regulators hiding and whose interests are they protecting? Why should the regulators be trusted for their safety assessment when in the case of both Bt cotton and Bt brinjal, the Supreme Court Technical Expert Committee (SC TEC) which took up a sample biosafety analyses in 2013 showed that the regulators were wrong in concluding the safety of these GMOs? The Supreme Court in 2008 had ordered that biosafety data be placed in public domain when petitioners in the GM PIL argued that unless the toxicity and allergenicity data are made known to the public, the applicants and concerned scientists in the country would not be in a position to make effective representations to the concerned authorities. On 26/6/2009, the CIC passed Orders in the case of RCGM (another regulatory body) withholding biosafety information and directed that the regulator should comply with the CIC decision on 22/11/2007 for providing existing data with regard to other agricultural products, before any massive farm trial. While these orders exist, my RTI application for biosafety data has been declined with regard to this GM mustard. We would also like to remind the government that in the case of Bt brinjal, the regulators sought public feedback and the Government of India took up public consultations before taking a final decision on Bt brinjal’s commercial cultivation fate in india. However, this current Government seems to be keen to conduct regulatory processes in a secretive fashion. Our past requests to meet with the Environment Minister to share our concerns met with no success. As the government gets more secretive and opaque around regulation, the public has a right to know what are they afraid of, if everything is safe and scientific?”, said Kavitha Kuruganti, Convenor of Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) who has been seeking biosafety data under RTI Act without any success. 
 
It is also pertinent to remember that GEAC continues to exhibit objectionable conflict of interest in its constitution and five years after the Bt brinjal moratorium decision in the country, nothing has improved as far as citizens’ interests are concerned, she said.
 
The Coalition demands that the Union Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Prakash Javadekar, under whose Ministry comes GEAC, to:
.  immediately intervene and stop the processing and approval of this GM mustard;
.  make public all the information regarding the safety tests of the GM Mustard without which no appraisal of this GMO should be taken up.
Notes to Editor:
For more information on this GM mustard and concerns around the same, please do visitwww.indiagminfo.org/?p=880 .
 
For more information on this GM mustard and concerns around the same, please do visit www.indiagminfo.org/?p=880 .
For more information, contact:
Rajesh Krishnan on 07559915032; rajeshecologist@gmail.com