Environmental for Food Justice

BIOSAFETY AND FOOD JUSTICE ACTIVISTS TO MEET ON EVE OF KEY ORE. & CO. VOTES ON GMO LABELING Moderator’s Note: The 4th Conference of the Biosafety Alliance: Justice Begins with Seeds convenes this week on September 12-13. We are posting a Welcome Letter prepared by Miguel Robles of the Biosafety Alliance and Devon G. Peña of The Acequia Institute that accompanies the Official Program. Please visit the Conference page at The Biosafety Alliance .   Welcome to the 4 th ‘Justice Begins With Seeds’ Conference Miguel Robles | Biosafety Alliance Devon G. Peña | The Acequia Institute The Fourth Conference of the Biosafety Alliance, Justice Begins with Seeds, convenes in Portland, Oregon on September 12th and 13th. The conference was planned 
during the 2013 Seattle gathering. It reflects lessons learned from the movement
 as it unfolded between the I-522 defeat in Washington state and the overwhelming approval, earlier this year, of the Jackson and Josephine County ordinances in Orego...

Is Tyson the Red Queen of GMO myth-making? Big Bang About Chilling-Out? ASTROPHYSICIST TYSON WAXES POETIC ABOUT GMOS Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | August 1, 2014 In an interview posted on YouTube on July 24 , astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the charming and brilliant host of the popular TV documentary series, Cosmos , defended the  use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for food crops. Tyson emphasized that opponents needed to “chill out” and characterized opponents as unwitting victims or manipulative purveyors of the “fear factor”. Responding to a question from a French journalist, the usually humorous interlocutor seemed somewhat stumped at first and then responded by rifting away with an explanation of how humans have been genetically modifying plants for more than ten thousand years; ever since people first domesticated wild plants and animals in the invention of agriculture. Fair enough. Are conventional (Mendellian) breeding techniques and the beautifully varied an...

Transgene escape. Courtesy of: ETC Group Moderator’s Note: One of the most significant proven threats to the environment stems from the use of genetically engineered organisms, including the widespread near global deployment of transgenic crops. With recent news that both China and Russia are retreating from the embrace of commercial agricultural biotechnology, it seems that the momentum against GMOs is increasing. A major issue facing the non-GMO movement stems from the decades long work done on the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and the Cartegena Biosafety Protocols, which establish rules for the protection of biodiversity including threats posed by transgenic organisms. An international coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has issued a call for an end to the spread of transgenes – the snippets of bacterial, viral, and other genetic materials that are used to assemble GMOs. Note that I use the term assemble because these are not inventions, they are assemblages of...