more info here:WikiLeaks: US Ambassador Planned ‘Retaliation’ Against France over Ban on Monsanto GMO Corn
Posted on December 22, 2010 by geobear7| 3 Comments
Craig Stapleton, former US Ambassador to France
By Mike Ludwig
t r u t h o u t
The former United States ambassador to France suggested “moving to retaliation” against France and the European Union (EU) in late 2007 to fight a French ban on Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) corn and changes in European policy toward biotech crops, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.
Former Ambassador Craig Stapleton was concerned about France’s decision to suspend cultivation of Monsanto’s MON-810 corn and warned that a new French environmental review standard could spread anti-biotech policy across the EU.
“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,” Stapleton wrote to diplomatic colleagues.
President George W. Bush appointed Stapleton as ambassador to France in 2005, and in 2009, Stapleton left the office and became an owner of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. Bush and Stapleton co-owned the Texas Rangers during the 1990s.
Monsanto is based in St. Louis.
The EU’s 1998 approval of MON-810 corn has since expired. In recent years, several European countries joined France in banning MON-810 and similar biotech crops while the products are reassessed in light of research showing they could harm the environment and human health.
It is not clear if Stapleton’s retaliation scheme was ever implemented.
“In our view, Europe is moving backwards not forwards on this issue with France playing a leading role, along with Austria, Italy and even the Commission … Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices,” Stapleton wrote.
MON-810 is engineered to excrete the Bt toxin, which is poisonous to some insect pests. A stacked version of MON-810 is also engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide first popularized by Monsanto under the brand name Roundup.
The debate in France over Monsanto’s GM products has grown ugly in recent years.
A recent Truthout report detailed the story of Dr. Gilles-Eric Seralini, a scientist at the University of Caen in France. Seralini’s supporters claim the scientist has faced intimidation from within the French scientific community after he published several studies showing Monsanto GM corn and glyphosate posed risks to human health.
Global food security at risk as crop biodiversity is lost
Saturday, January 29, 2011 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031144_food_security_biodiversity.html#ixzz1CbEQlfaZ
Global food security may be in peril unless immediate measures are taken to stem the dramatic loss of genetic diversity among food crops and their wild relatives, according to a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
It is largely the genetic diversity found in both cultivated and wild varieties of food crops that allows farmers and scientists to create new strains. In the face of a changing climate, the ability to develop crops that can resist drought, heat, salinity, disease and pests will only become more important. Yet according to the report, 75 percent of crop diversity has already been lost since 1900, as agribusiness focused on increasing the output of a few big cash crops and rare local varieties disappeared. Habitat destruction has wiped out wild relatives of food crops, and global warming is exacerbating those effects. By 2050, the report predicts, 22 percent of wild bean, peanut and potato relatives will be lost to climate change.
Brian O'Leary describes the situation in his book Reinheriting the Earth: "It is as if humankind is painting a picture of the next millennium with a shrinking palette -- the world will still be colored green, but in increasingly uniform and monocultured tones. One in eight species are immediately threatened. To make matters more challenging, the genetic diversity of food supply keeps decreasing. For the sake of improving agricultural efficiency, large centralized seed providers narrow the choices for farmers and raise the risk of major crops being wiped out by blights or bad weather."
The FAO report calls for an immediate effort to collect and study the remaining wild crop relatives and rare cultivars.
"The loss of biodiversity will have a major impact on the ability of humankind to feed itself in the future; all nine billion of us by 2050, with the poorest in the world most affected," the report warns.
Namaste
