News
2015-01-05 | permalink
L.A. City Council panel backs away from GMO ban
City Council panel backs away from GMO ban it previously supported
Three days before Los Angeles lawmakers voted on a proposal to ban genetically modified crops, the world's largest biotechnology trade group hired three top City Hall lobbyists to stop it.
The matter had sailed through a meeting weeks before with only one City Council member expressing doubt.
But when a council committee sat down to vote again this month, three of the five members came out strongly against it — though they said lobbyists had nothing to do with it.
The action shocked Councilman Paul Koretz, who co-authored the proposal and expected his colleagues to rubber-stamp it as they had many times before.
"Since nothing else had changed ... it clearly was heavy lobbying," Koretz said later.
Such a ban would be largely symbolic in L.A. because there are currently no known genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs, grown within the city.
City Council panel backs away from GMO ban it previously supported - LA Times2015-01-05 | permalink
Iowa Farmers File Lawsuits Against Syngenta Over GMO
Iowa lawsuits accuse Syngenta over rejected GMO crops
Iowa farmers and companies are suing Syngenta AG, claiming they suffered financial losses when China rejected corn shipments containing a genetically modified seed developed by the agribusiness giant but not approved for use by China.
Sixteen growers and businesses filed suit Monday seeking monetary and punitive damages from Syngenta, which is based in Switzerland and has operations in Iowa. Including previous legal action, the company now faces challenges from more than 100 farmers and commodity traders, including Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.
"Syngenta has caused damages to U.S. farmers, grain handlers and exporters," the latest lawsuits allege. "Syngenta's conduct in marketing, distributing and selling unapproved corn seed violates the legal standards of the marketplace because the primary market risk falls on U.S. farmers, grain handlers and exporters, not on Syngenta."
2015-01-02 | permalink
How food gets the Non-GMO label
Demand for products that don’t contain genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, is exploding.
Many food companies are seeking certification that their products don’t have any genetically modified ingredients, and not just the brands popular in the health food aisle. Even plain Cheerios, that iconic cereal from General Mills, no longer contains GMOs.
“We currently are at over $8.5 billion in annual sales of verified products,” said Megan Westgate, executive director of the Non-GMO Project, the main supplier of non-GMO labels.
To receive the label, a product has to be certified as containing ingredients with less than 1 percent genetic modification. Westgate says that’s a realistic standard, while totally GMO-free is not. She says natural foods stores began the process of defining a standard, involving other interested players along the way, including consumers. Now, General Mills is just one of the big food companies selling non-GMO products.
Sales of food labeled as “Non-GMO” ballooned to over $3 billion in 2013, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“Interestingly, with all of this traction in the natural sector,” Westgate said, “we’re increasingly seeing more conventional companies coming on board and having their products verified.”
2014-12-29 | permalink
GMO potato protesters win lighter sentences on appeal
SUMMARY
The Ghent court of appeal has heavily reduced the sentences of 11 protesters who were accused of causing criminal damage for their role in destroying a genetically modified potato crop in 2011
“Not hardened criminals”
A group of protesters who objected to a test project of genetically modified potatoes have had their sentences drastically reduced by the Ghent court of appeal, after the court threw out a conviction for criminal conspiracy.
The action by the so-called Field Liberation Movement took place in the East Flemish town of Wetteren in May 2011. The target: a field of test crops being grown as part of an experiment run by the University of Ghent, the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology and the Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research, both agencies of the Flemish government. The activists destroyed a third of the potato crop and clashed with police, who made 40 arrests.
In the initial trial, a group of 11 activists was convicted of criminal damage and conspiracy, and given suspended sentences of three to six months as well as fines of €550.
The appeal court has now reduced the sentences to one month suspended.
2014-12-23 | permalink
After opposition: Monsanto patent on tomatoes revoked
no patent on seeds
Monsanto implicated in “fraud and abuse of patent law”
22 December 2014 / Munich.
Patent EP1812575 held by the US company Monsanto has been revoked by the European Patent Office (EPO) after the international coalition No Patents on Seeds! filed an opposition in May 2014. A further opposition was filed by Nunhems / Bayer CropScience. In November 2014, Monsanto requested that the patent be revoked in its entirety and the EPO complied with this request. The patent covered conventionally bred tomatoes with a natural resistance to a fungal disease called botrytis, which were claimed as an invention. The original tomatoes used for this patent were accessed via the international gene bank in Gatersleben, Germany, and it was already known that these plants had the desired resistance. Monsanto produced a cleverly worded patent in order to create the impression that genetic engineering had been used to produce the tomatoes and to make it look 'inventive'.
“Revoking this patent is an important success. It was more or less based on a combination of fraud, abuse of patent law and biopiracy. The patent could have been used to monopolise important genetic resources. Now breeders, growers and consumers have a chance of benefiting from a greater diversity of tomatoes improved by further breeding”, says Christoph Then, a coordinator of No Patents on Seeds!. “The intended resistance is based on complex genetic conditions, which are not known in detail. So genetic engineering is clearly not an option in this case.”
