Articles

A bill implying a stronger control over GMO usage was put on the Armenian National Assembly’s floor on Friday again.

Caught between rising pressures to increase its food resources and popular skepticism over allowing more genetically modified food, China’s government is stepping up a public-relations campaign that could pave the way toward full approval for commercial production of these politically sensitive crops.

Monsanto Company (NYSE:MON) significantly increased its spending on federal lobbying in the third quarter of 2013 as it sought to increase its influence on a variety of policy issues, including the so-called Monsanto Protection Act. The agricultural giant best known for producing genetically modified, or GMO, seeds spent more than $2.4 million on lobbying in the third quarter of 2013, up more than $1 million from the $1.4 million it spent in the second quarter, according to U.S. Senate lobbying records.

Today the African Centre for Biosafety (ACB) released a new report ‘Africa bullied to grow defective Bt Maize: the failure of Monsanto’s MON810 maize in South Africa’i, showing how Monsanto’s GM maize, which utterly failed in SA, is now being foisted on the rest of the continent, through ‘sleight of hand’.

In a brief interview with Agriculture.com, 2013 World Food Prize Laureate Robert Fraley, Monsanto's Chief Technology Officer, said the he expects his company to try to end a recent suspension of field trials of genetically modified corn in Mexico. "This will be a case where we'll follow up," Fraley said Thursday during a visit to the Des Moines, Iowa-based media company, Meredith Corporation (publisher of Successful Farming magazine).

In a great bit of news for World Food Day, a key Brazilian congressional committee today withdrew the consideration of legislation that would have allowed the sale and use of Terminator Technology, also known as suicide seeds. The Constitutional Commission of the Brazilian House of Representatives was slated to consider Bill PL 268/2007 this morning, but decided instead to withdraw it from the agenda – taking into account the social concerns raised by the national and international mobilization in opposition to the bill.

Lawmakers on the tropical island of Kauai, Hawaii, on Wednesday approved a hotly contested measure aimed at reining in widespread pesticide use by companies testing new genetically modified crops on the island.

Hundreds of demonstrators descended on the entrance to Monsanto Co. world headquarters Saturday, where they chanted anti-Monsanto slogans, waved picket signs and sometimes waded into street traffic.

An October 10 press release with Mexico City byline announces the banning of genetically-engineered corn in Mexico. According to the group that issued the press release, La Coperacha, a federal judge has ordered Mexico’s SAGARPA (Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca, y Alimentación), which is Mexico’s Secretary of Agriculture, and SEMARNAT (Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales), which is equivalent of the EPA, to immediately “suspend all activities involving the planting of transgenic corn in the country and end the granting of permission for experimental and pilot commercial plantings”.

Environmental groups fighting against the use of GM crops in Africa and Asia are “wicked” and potentially condemning millions of people to a premature death, the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, says today.