27/May/21

 

In a statement published yesterday, "Retailers' Resolution: European retailers take a strong stand against deregulating new GMOs", leading companies of the European food retail sector, among them major international brands as well as numerous national and organic retailers, demand that the proven-effective regulation of GMOs on the European market be maintained. This applies to products of "old genetic engineering" (primarily soy, maize, rapeseed) as well as to those produced with "new genetic engineering" methods such as CRISPR or TALEN. GMWatch

 

 

Responding to the first discussions between EU agriculture ministers on the regulatory future of a new generation of GMOs, Mute Schimpf, food and farming campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, said: “Farming ministers and the rest of the EU need to stop wasting time and resources trying to find loopholes to push new, untested GMOs onto our fields and plates without any safety protocols. The last thing we need is a raft of patented crops designed to prop up the industrial farming system that EU decision-makers should be working to dismantle. Instead of putting more money in the hands of the biotech industry, we need to urgently invest in small-scale farming and agroecology.” GMWatch

 

 

Bayer said it will review the future of its Roundup and other glyphosate-based weedkillers in the US residential market after a judge rejected a $2 billion plan to settle future claims alleging the herbicide causes cancer. The company also said it will reassess its efforts to settle around 30,000 ongoing claims by Roundup users who are alleging they have become sick from the product. The announcement came hours after a US judge rejected Bayer's $2 billion class action proposal, which would have provided compensation in return for placing limits on lawsuits. US District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco called the plan "clearly unreasonable". Reuters; comment by GMWatch

 

 

If Bill Gates has his way, the food in our future will little resemble what’s on our plates today. Gates and his agribusiness industry partners are proposing to transform our food and how it is produced. To the techno-food industrialists, hunger and climate change are problems to be solved with data and engineering. The core ingredients of their revolutionary plan: genetic engineering — and patenting — of everything from seeds and food animals, to microbes in the soil, to the processes we use to make food. Local food cultures and traditional diets could fade away as food production moves indoors to labs that cultivate fake meat and ultra-processed foods. US Right to Know