• Common Ground •

Our Founding Fathers preferred the term Liberty, using it in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Lately, freedom has come to mean some things that liberty would never tolerate. Liberty includes freedom in its conceptual definition, but liberty comes with two other concepts that the currently defined concept of freedom seems to lack: responsibility and limits. Extend that idea to the global opportunism of corporations and the distance from responsibility and limits seems even further.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) has published a leaked copy of the secret draft ruling in the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute over genetically modified foods. The United States, Canada, and Argentina launched a legal challenge against the European Union (EU) in May 2003, claiming that Europe's reluctance to embrace genetically modified foods damaged their farmers and was a barrier to trade. The WTO ruled that national genetically modified bans are illegal and it is likely that countries with bans in place will be put under renewed pressure to lift them. The 1,000-page report, which was distributed earlier this January only to the countries involved in the dispute, was leaked to Friends of the Earth. FOE added that the leaked report reveals that the World Trade Organization did not rule on two of the most important questions, namely whether GM foods are effectively the same as non-GMO foods and if they are safe. According to Friends of the Earth International, the WTO is not and should not be the appropriate body to deal with conflicts between trade rules and environmental protection since it considers only trade principles and has no particular competence in environmental or health issues. FOE says the leaked WTO report ruling states:
* Europe’s four-year moratorium on genetically modified organisms only broke trade rules because it caused “undue delay” in the approval of new genetically modified foods. The WTO dismissed eight other complaints in relation to the moratorium, and did not recommend any further action, since the moratorium ended in 2004.
* There was also an “undue delay” in the European Union’s approval procedures for more than 20 specified biotech products. However, 11 other claims of the complainants related to the product-specific E.U. measures were dismissed by the WTO panel.
* Safeguard measures by E.U. member states broke trade rules only because the risk assessments used by the countries in question did not comply with the WTO requirements.

Despite pleas from US farm groups, Syngenta AG is selling a genetically modified corn seed that has not yet been approved in most overseas markets, raising concerns that the corn could damage US corn exports worth $4.8 billion last year.
The GM corn, Agrisure RW, is genetically altered to kill corn rootworm.
Syngenta has required US farmers that purchase Agrisure to sign an agreement saying they will only deliver the corn to non-export facilities.
“Irresponsible”
As was seen in 2001 with the billion-dollar StarLink corn debacle, it has been difficult for US grain handlers to keep unapproved GM varieties separate from approved GMOs.
“We’ve seen that approach several times over and we have witnessed its dismal failure,” said Kevin Adams, chief executive of CGB Enterprises, a grain handler and exporter, in an interview with Reuters.
Both CGB and Bunge Ltd., another large exporter, have told farmers they will not accept Agrisure corn.
Syngenta says it is selling Agrisure to help farmers increase yields to meet the strong demand for corn-based ethanol and livestock feed.

In other words, in spite of the concerns of the very farmers who will suffer when their grain is refused by other countries, Syngenta will have it's money in hand having sold the seed stock and further contaminated the supply. This isn't a faceless company. These are people making decisions that only consider their  financial interest and they are taking cues from the leadership, again individuals, who are permitting and facilitating this kind of hubris for the sake of profit. Case in point: in mid-April a soy processing facility received a call from a customer saying that his soy ingredient tested positive for GMO's. The facility is 100% organic. Trying to trace the source of the contamination, samples taken from a rail car of  organic soybeans tested out at 20% GMO material. This amounts to about a truckload (20 - 25 tons) of GM soybeans in the rail car load (about 100 tons). The processor, because of a personal strong ethic is not selling the material as organic and has lost over $100,000 due to the contamination. The on farm supplier has tested clean and so it seems that the commingling was somewhere in the chain of custody from farm to processor. The processor asserts, "A certain amount of GMO has gotten into all aspects of soybean production, including organic." -"I've been in the organic industry for a long time. It was an industry built around trust, but after this I have absolutely no trust for anybody." Can you blame him? Meanwhile unlike 44 other countries that have mandatory labeling of GMO material, the industry lobby is so powerful in the US that I doubt if we'll ever see that on a label. In my opinion, this is just another step towards American farmers becoming nothing more than sharecroppers for the Agri-Chemical-Pharmaceutical industrial complex.

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