----- Original Message ----- From: <tpl at cheerful.com> To: <asia-apec at jca.ax.apc.org> Sent: Thursday, 16 September 1999 9:53 Subject: [asia-apec 1298] Peasants protest mutant corn field test in Mindanao, Laguna
KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines)
PEASANTS OPPOSE GM CORN, GENETIC IMPERIALISM
The Kilusan ng Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) demanded that government ban the commercialization of experimental crops that have been crossbred with dubious gene material because of threats to farmers' seed traditions, genetic diversity and consumer health.
KMP chair Rafael Mariano said that peasants will lose the twelve-millennium-old rights to raise their own seeds to agrocorporations which control the trade of food, chemicals and seeds and which have exclusive rights to the new seeds that need huge doses of chemicals.
On June 1, the village council of Barangay Lagao, General Santos City passed a resolution asking the National Committee on Bio-Safety of the Philippines (NCBP) to reverse the impending approval of a field release by the seed and chemical conglomerate Monsanto-Cargill of transgenic (genetically engineered) corn.
According to a non-government organization Searice, the NCBP is mandated to regulate laboratory researches in enclosed gardens only and not of field tests.
Councilor Rolito Blando led the council to ask Monsanto-Cargill to stop field preparations and also asked the city council to declare Gen. Santos free of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). They charged that city agriculturist and the local health and environment offices were not notified of the field tests.
Called Bt-corn, it is ordinary Zea mays L infused with a gene from the bacteria Bacillus Thuringensis that produces poisons inside the plant to combat corn borers.
Manuel Yap, head of the farmer-scientist group Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Ikauunlad ng Agham Pang-agrikultura (Masipag), warned that Bt-corn can breed with normal corn and corn-related weeds in a process called "genetic pollution."
Bt-toxin kills beneficial and innocent insects, and even turn the corn borer into "super pests" resistant to the toxin. Yap said this can cause massive crop failures when super pests attack traditional corn nationwide, thus neutralizing local farmer opposition to imported corn. Industrialized countries will be unhampered in dumping their surpluses of corn and corn-substitutes on the country.
Meanwhile, the Katipunan ng mga Samahang Magbubukid sa Timog Katagalugan (KASAMA-TK) is also protesting a similar introduction by DuPont-Pioneer HiBred in Barangay Masaya, Bay, Laguna.
According to the group's president, Jerry Mangubat, Bt-corn is the continuation of the Green Revolution which destroyed self-sufficiency of farmers when it promised higher yields, yet replaced traditional plants with weakling monocultures that need costly inputs. Mangubat said Monsanto and Pioneer promote pesticide use instead of traditional manual labor to manage pests, thus increasing landlessness and unemployment in the countryside and damage the rural folk's health.
Pioneer controls 34% of the US$1.33 billion US hybrid corn market while Monsanto is the second largest agrochemical giant and third largest seed company that has bought eight other firms for US$8.1 billion.
Farmers' groups in Europe, Brazil and India have launched huge protests that involved uprooting and burning of transgenic cotton and soya. Offices of Cargill and Monsanto in India have even been vandalized.
Widespread consumer boycotts have forced food giants and supermarkets to pull out GMOs and genetically-altered foods (GAFs).
Mariano said Estrada's Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA) provides the structure and policy framework for the systematic spread of "genetic imperialism."
"The new technology will be coursed through corporative farming schemes under AFMA, in which peasants will further be tied down to tenancy to big landlords and multinational corporations, with the added burden of dealing with still unknown health dangers emanating from contact with new DNA recombinations," Mariano added.
While human reaction to the Bt-toxin remains untested, doctors in the United Kingdom have linked animal and human illness to consuming GMOs because of the popular use by the biotechnology industry of third genes called "enhancers" and "markers."
Markers are fragments of antibiotics which make it easier for technicians to know if a breeding has succeeded. Also, parts of deactivated viruses, because of their infective character, are used as enhancers to heighten the expression of the gene, for example, improved shelf-life, flavor or color.
A promoter gene from the cauliflower mosaic virus, popular in the industry and used to boost herbicide-tolerant traits in soya, is suspected of making laboratory rats suffer organ abnormalities after they were fed with transgenic potatoes.
Bt-corn contains markers from ampicillin, a popular antibiotic in the Philippines, and contact with bacteria in the intestines of cattle and humans can create super-germs that are immune to penicillin drugs, increasing a future danger of wildfire epidemics of previously controllable infections.
Mariano said corporate biotechnology has produced a series of failures and cannot justify its claims to raise yields, relieve hunger, make crops resistant to stresses, increase nutrition and liberate peasants from inhumane labor. Instead, genetic imperialism merely commercializes agriculture while creating conditions for environmental disaster.
KMP demands an unconditional removal of all GM crops from planned open tests worldwide. It calls on Filipino and other Third World peasants to oppose imperialist globalization and its nenewed attempts to propagate export-oriented crops in their respective countries thus further endangering food security.
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