Environmentalists throughout the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to political prisoner Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks. It wasn’t only secret recordings pertaining to war and crimes-against-humanity that Wikileaks published. A slew of cables Assange published revealed massive US government attempts on behalf of Monsanto to coerce governments to allow foreign corporate land ownership, and with it genetically engineered agriculture throughout the world, and to squelch opposition to GMOs, breaking down laws restricting or banning GM. The cables revealed US officials applying financial, diplomatic, and frequently military pressure on behalf of Monsanto and other biotech corporations. These cables were followed by revelations that US, the World Bank and IMF loans “opened up Ukraine to major corporate inroads", writes Joyce Nelson. “Loan conditions are forcing the deeply indebted country to open up to GMO crops, and lift the ban on private sector land ownership. US corporations are jubilant at the ‘goldmine’ that awaits them.” The information reveals stipulations in the terms of the US’s massive arms financing of Ukraine going back for more than a decade. And in 2020, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill into law authorising the sale of farmland in Ukraine, lifting a moratorium that had been in place since 2001. This bill is part of a series of policy reforms upon which the IMF conditioned its $8 billion loan package. Counterpunch

 

 

Ever since Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued his initial 2020 decree restricting GM corn and glyphosate imports and uses, US commodity and agribusiness groups have been sounding alarms about the economic damages the measures would cause. The alarms kept ringing even after a series of productive negotiations resulted in a new decree in February 2023 that reduced the immediate restrictions on GM corn, postponing any action on GM feed corn imports and restricting only the use of GM corn in the tortilla-masa food chain. US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, in announcing the call for formal consultations under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) March 6, asserted, “Mexico’s policies threaten to disrupt billions of dollars in agricultural trade.” But there is no credible evidence to support that claim. The exaggerated claims of economic damage sprang from a convenient set of assumptions, all of which are flawed and outdated. IATP

 

 

The National Farmers Union (NFU) of Canada has written an open letter urging the Canadian international trade minister to refrain from joining with the United States as a Third Party on the dispute settlement panel the USA has requested under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) regarding Mexico’s measures concerning imports of GM corn for human consumption. NFU Canada asks the minister to "respect Mexico’s decision to prohibit imports of GM corn for human consumption, as it has put these measures in place in order to uphold its food sovereignty, including the traditional Indigenous farming systems known as milpa." NFU Canada continues, "We urge you to refrain from having Canada join the Panel as a Third Party in order to avoid escalating our role in this dispute out of respect for Indigenous rights, Canada being signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and to support Canada’s biodiversity protection commitments as a signatory of the UN Convention on Biodiversity." NFU Canada

 

 

Genetically engineered (GE) varieties of eucalyptus trees are poised to exacerbate a new wave of ecological and social destruction. Brazil has approved seven varieties of GE trees. Current plantations rob regions of water, destroy wildlife habitat, and transform large swaths of land within the Cerrado — an expansive, biodiverse tropical biome situated in eastern Brazil — into unnatural, destructive monoculture farms: rows upon rows of non-native eucalyptus trees without vegetation in their understory. Many traditional communities and Indigenous people have opposed the spread of these plantations in the country. Varieties of GE eucalyptus are pesticide-resistant and are likely to increase the use of toxic chemicals such as Roundup, the glyphosate-based weedkiller developed by Monsanto in the 1970s, which is the world’s most used herbicide — and was acquired by Bayer in 2018. Other engineered traits, such as increased growth rates, could make the trees more profitable for the pulp and paper industry but significantly more harmful to the environment. Sri Lanka Guardia

 

 

US President Joe Biden’s 90-day probe into the origins of Covid-19 censored the input of intelligence agency scientists who concluded the virus was most likely genetically engineered. When the report was published it concluded that most intelligence agencies assessed the virus, even if it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was natural rather than manipulated in a laboratory. But this was not the assessment made by the four groups within the intelligence agencies that actually engaged in scientific analysis, who concurred that there was either a highly likely or reasonable chance the virus was genetically engineered. One of the scientists at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Centre for Medical Intelligence (DIA NCMI) discovered that the size and location of a fragment of the Covid-19 virus resembled the same fragment in Wuhan Institute of Virology research from more than a decade earlier, in 2008. It was the same technique that the WIV had used in grant applications to make chimeric viruses. “This paper is the smoking gun of everything. When the team reviewed this data, they thought ‘This is created in the lab. It’s a reverse genetics construct,” a source said. But their input into the 90-day origins probe was censored. Sources close to the inquiry estimated about 90 per cent of the DIA NCMI edits were deleted, censored or simply weren’t included. Sky News

 

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