03/April/20

 

Bayer is reneging on negotiated settlements with several US law firms representing thousands of plaintiffs who claim exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicides caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, sources involved in the litigation said. The reversal comes as US courts are closed to the public because of the spreading coronavirus, eliminating the spectre of another Roundup cancer trial in the near future. US Right to Know

 

 

US agrochemical firm Monsanto and Germany's BASF were aware for a long time that their plan to introduce their GMO dicamba-based agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms. According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, the firms disregarded the risks even while they planned on how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto's new seeds just to avoid damage. The documents (some of them date back more than a decade) have been uncovered during a recent successful $265 million lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer. RT

 

 

In September 2019 the UK-based group Beyond GM partnered with the organic industry association IFOAM-EU to bring together a diverse group of plant breeders and people engaged in issues related to plant breeding to discuss the question of whether there should be limits and boundaries in plant breeding. An article on A Bigger Conversation website details the findings of the meeting and the report based on it. Those findings neatly summarise a major issue facing agriculture and food production: within the EU and in the UK, the agreed policy is that different forms of agriculture – conventional, GM, or organic – must co-exist. Yet no one can work out, or agree on, how this could or should work in practice. Indeed, hardly anyone is even talking about it. A Bigger Conversation; comment by GMWatch

 

 

The spread of the coronavirus has been a massive wake-up call for humankind, and not just in a scientific, logistical or even personal sense. It has also shown us that the way we live on the planet is fatally out of balance. We should think of COVID-19 as a warning. We must change the way we inhabit the planet, or otherwise face self-destruction caused by our own negligence, if not by the pandemic then by environmental destruction (or both). High Country News