Trans-genetic Seed Problem in France

On the 23 of March 2007 in Uzès, hunger strikers set up in the open house of Montreuil, striking for an Uzès spring without OGM. This was the start of their 10th day of strike. Like them, 86 % of the French wished for a moratorium on the cultivation of OGM. While Jacques Chirac calls the whole world to the ecological revolution, his government is publishing a decree to transpose the order of 2001/18, in the hurry to legalize the voluntary dispearsal of transgenetic plants on French territory.

Thus, the GMO-farmers are told to inform their neighbors and to respect a distance of 50 meters of separation between the plots. Some rapeseed pollen had been found more than 4.5 kilometers from its initial field, and seeds transported by the wind at more than 20 kilometers. With GMO, an infernal spiral is engaged between civilian society and the seed and biotechnology industries. Are the French farmers really going to end up like the 950 organic farmers of Quebec, who were victims of both pollution and laws suits initiated by the multinational Monsanto?

Today certain French cooperatives, under pressure from the seeders, are imposing two chemical knife treatments on conventional corn, with which GMO would cultivate this spring.  The Pioneer Society freely distributes the GMO seeds. Their objective is to command well the GMO by whatever means, even genetic pollution if necessary. Despite serious scientific alerts with this, again recently, the president Gilles Eric Seralini, member of Critigen and of the Commission of Biomolecular engineering, called out to the responsible politicians on the serious consequences.

In regards to health: MON 863, authorized for consumption, shows signs of hepatic and renal toxicity, revealed through rats fed for only three months with this famous corn. What’s more MON 810, only to be cultivated today in France, is very close to this toxic corn and has never been correctly evaluated. Even the review of European rules of Organic agriculture is subject to the tough test. They predict accepting a contamination thresh hold of 0.9 %, at nine grams per kilogram, in the organic products. Such a rule will lift one of the last ramparts against pollution spread by genetically modified organisms.

Nature and Progress, the Federation of producers and of organic consumers, is rising up against this diktat of GMO and supports the action of the hunger strikers for a spring without GMO. They are calling the president of the Republic to beautifully withdraw by putting his acts in agreement with his speech of a moratorium by the institution of OGM, 100 % legally receivable by Europe before the seeds of the month of April 2007 are sown.