Via Campesina occupies Monsanto and destroys GMOtest trials in SP

[impossibleartist]

The women from Via Campesina occupied, this Friday morning (03/07), a
Biotech Research Unit of the US company, Monsanto and destroyed a
plant nursery and a GMO experimental trial field, in Santa Cruz das
Palmeiras (km 229Anhanguera motorway), São Paulo countryside,

Via Campesina protests against the release, by the National Council on
Biosafety (CNBS), of two GMO corn varieties. Lula's administration
gave in to the pressures from the agro-business and released in
February, the license for farming and trade of the Guardian variety
(Monsanto MON18 stream) e Libertlink (from the German Bayer).

Once again, the release of those two streams demonstrates, Lula's
administration political choice to side with the agri-business and
large foreign companies, leaving aside the Agrarian Reform and family
agriculture.


The action is part of Via Campesina National Struggle Rally, which has
already mobilized5 states against the agro-business. In 2001,
Greenpeace had already organized a protest in the same area and found
the illegal farming of GM corn.


The spreading of GMOs throughout the country, takes seed control from
the hands of rural workers and hands it to transnational corporations
and can make the production of organic goods unfeasible. A report from
Greenpeace revealed 39 cases of contamination and illegal farming of
the GM streams in 23 countries. In its large majority, corn crops.
Since 2005, 216 cases of contamination have been identified in 57
countries.

 
There are no scientific studies which can definitely guarantee that
GMO foods do not have negative effects on human health or the
environment. The doubts concerning genetically modified foods in labs
led to 81.9% of the Brazilian population to reject GMO farming,
according to a research requested by Greenpeace.

Nowadays, four transnational corporations hold almost total control of
the GMO market in the world and 49% of all the seed market. Monsanto,
for instance,controls 70% of the production of commercial corn stream
seeds in Brazil and now it intends to replace them by GMOs.



Via Campesina denounces that GMOs are not simply genetically modified
organisms, but lab generated crops which  place agriculture in the
hands of the financial and industrial world. Society is no longer
before traditional agriculture,but rather of groups which use GMOs to
control seeds and impose the use of the implements and poisons they
produce, privatizing the role of seed improvement and peasant and
indigenous farming.

 

What peasant women propose for the countryside is based on the defense
of food sovereignty, which establishes that each country must have the
conditions to produce their own food, assuring their autonomy and
creating the conditions to fight famine and the development of
agriculture.