02/December/20

 

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Leydy Pech, an indigenous Mayan beekeeper, led a coalition that successfully halted Monsanto’s planting of genetically modified soybeans in southern Mexico. The Mexican Supreme Court ruled that the government violated the Mayans’ constitutional rights and suspended the planting of genetically modified soybeans. Because of the persistence of Pech and her coalition, in September 2017, Mexico’s Food and Agricultural Service revoked Monsanto’s permit to grow genetically modified soybeans in seven states. Now Pech has been awarded the 2020 Goldman Environmental Prize. GMWatch

 

 

The Cornell Alliance for Science is an organisation that operates out of Cornell University. As an institution, the Alliance is misnamed, however. It is not an Alliance and it owes its allegiance not to Cornell but to its founder and main funder, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Moreover, as shown in a new report, neither does the Alliance promote ‘science'. Rather, it promotes agribusiness, its associated technologies, and its principal agendas. It does so largely by virtue of extended trainings in public relations, given at Cornell, to its ‘Global Leadership Fellows’. These are individuals recruited from target nations and who then return to their homelands to act as paid mouthpieces for their sponsors. Independent Science News

 

 

An article in the Guardian offers a largely uncritical view of lab-grown fake meat, which has just been approved in Singapore. The article minimises the problem of the massive energy and resource requirements for fake meat production and simply ignores the food safety question. GMWatch comment on article in the Guardian

 

 

India’s proposal to make it mandatory for certain imported food crops to have certificates showing non-genetically modified (GM) origin and GM-free status from January 1, 2021 has been objected to by the US, Australia, Brazil and some others at the World Trade Organization on the grounds that it would create an “undue burden" on exporting countries. [GMW: The US, Brazil and Australia are GMO-growing countries.] The Hindu BusinessLine