GMOs Not Solution to Food Crisis, Envi Group Says

Greenpeace calls on gov’t to heed UN warnings

POSTED BY BULATLAT
Vol. VIII, No. 11, April 20-26, 2008

Greenpeace, an international environmental organization, has called on the Philippine government to heed the warnings of the world’s leading agricultural scientists that industrial agricultural practices and genetically-modified (GMO) crops will not solve the current food crisis.

The call came at the launch of a landmark United Nations (UN) report-the very first assessment of global agriculture that recommends the replacement of destructive chemical-intensive agriculture with methods that work with nature not against it. Some 60 governments, meeting in Johannesburg since last week, have signed the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development’s (IAASTD) final report, expected to guide agricultural and food production in the coming decades. The report says industrial agriculture has failed and that GMOs are no solution for poverty, hunger or climate change.

“The ongoing rice crisis should not be used as an excuse to neglect our existing regulations governing GMOs, especially since there are other sources of GMO-free rice,” said Greenpeace Southeast Asia Genetic Engineering Campaigner Daniel Ocampo. “The recommendations of the report are especially significant as it clearly shows the failure of past and present government-initiated programs to boost rice production through agriculture highly dependent on costly toxic chemical inputs as well as corporate-owned seeds, such as GMOs and hybrid seeds. The government would do well to heed the report and reexamine their misplaced focus on industrial farming which has diverted government funds from supporting ecological solutions to that ensure food security and sound environment.”

Greenpeace maintains that the Philippine government’s plans to increase fertilizer subsidies and its support of GMO crops are unsound farming practices that would endanger, rather than improve, the country’s agricultural sector.

“By using these methods, the government is actually compounding the food problem, not solving it,” Ocampo added. “The worst example is how the National Food Authority has distributed US rice which has not yet been stringently tested to be GMO-free.”

The Philippine government blatantly supports GMO crops, even those that have been rejected in other countries for safety concerns.

The UN IAASTD report is highly critical of GMOs, calling instead for a fundamental change in farming practices, in order to address soaring food prices, hunger, social inequities and environmental disasters. It acknowledges that genetically engineered crops are highly controversial and will not play a substantial role in addressing the key problems of climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger and poverty.

It recommends small-scale farming and agro-ecological methods as the way forward if the current food crisis is to be solved, as well as meeting the needs of local communities, declaring indigenous and local knowledge play as important a role as formal science, a significant departure from the destructive chemical-dependent, one-size-fits-all model of industrial agriculture. Posted by (Bulatlat.com)