Global Coalition Forms to Take On GMO Agriculture

Update: We just learned that Hillary Clinton is the keynote speaker at BIO, the biotech industry’s annual conference – I guess we know her views on GMOs. 

As organizers around the world prepare to March Against Monsanto this Saturday, a new global organization has formed to take the GMO issue on.

The Global GMO Free Coalition brings together GMO-free groups across 6 continents with a total membership of over 4.5 million people.

David is ready to take Goliath on!

"This is a global issue that deserves a global approach. The GMO industry is attempting to take over the world’s food supply with untested, harmful products and we will not let this happen," says Henry Rowlands, Coordinator of the Global GMO Free Coalition.

Incredibly, GMOs and their associated pesticides weren’t independently tested before being released into the environment, he says. GMO cropland has grown 100-fold since first commercialized in 1996, the fastest adopted agricultural technology ever, reaching 420 million acres in 2012. 

 
More than 60 groups are part of this first globally coordinated network that plans to take the GMO food and crop industry head on. Among the countries represented: US, UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Russia, Georgia, Iran, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Taiwan, Australia, South Africa, New Caledonia and Ghana.

Its aim, they say, is to cut through biotech industry propaganda, providing fact-based independent information to the media and governments that leads to responsible regulation in countries worldwide.

"A global system of agriculture built around mono-crops that are engineered to resist massive amounts of toxic herbicides and pesticides is unsustainable on all levels. Science has proven that weeds and insects eventually evolve to become tolerant of chemicals like glyphosate and 2,4-D, leading to a perpetual, and unsustainable, cycle of super weeds, super bugs and the need for a dizzying array of increasingly toxic chemicals to control them. Those toxins are harmful to all living things, including humans. All the current research points to the need to return to a system built around diverse food crops, adapted for local growing conditions, and grown without the use of chemical inputs," says Katherine Paul, Associate Director of the Organic Consumers Association (USA).

"Sadly, a GMO free world is now virtually impossible. Transgenes have already escaped into the biosphere, creating a pollution that is truly irreversible. The least we can do is to stop this global experiment, as it is being conducted without the informed consent of those being exposed to its fallout.

"The agrochemical-based global farming system, infatuated as it is by GMOs, is waging a full scale chemical war against the biosphere, of which we form an inseparable part. Calling this farming is the ultimate absurdity, as this food production system requires the inevitable destruction of the soil, the biodiversity and even the producers and consumers who eventually must succumb to suboptimal nutrition and poisoning," says Sayer Ji, Founder of GreenMedInfo (USA).

"Russia is the largest country in the world, a country with a unique geographical landscape and biodiversity. We realize our responsibility to the world in preserving the purity and fertility of the land, because of the fact that it is a unique source of genetic resources for the whole world. Therefore, we believe that Russia can and must retain the status of a global environmental donor and prevent the cultivation of GMOs.
Today, global corporations have forgotten that this planet belongs to every inhabitant of the Earth in equal form," says Elena Sharoykina, Director of the National Association for Genetic Safety in Russia.

Here is the website: