http://www.kiwiingenuity.org/thegesellout/
coming sept 20th

Was the Royal Commission set up not as an impartial "court of inquiry" - but to produce a report favourable to the biotech industry?

Why has the NZ government consistently denied that there is evidence of serious dangers with GE?

NZ has been threatened by the US and the WTO if we go GE-free. Why doesn't the PM admit it?

The NZ government has been able to get away with dismissing the proof of serious dangers from GE, largely thanks to the fact that GE got a cautious approval from the Royal Commission.

The Royal Commission, however, was from the start a crucial part of the government's "game plan" - to engineer popular opinion. The Commission's deliberate distortion of the evidence of harm and danger from GE was simply too obvious and repetitive to have been "accidental".

After careful analysis and deliberation the authors of this book now believe that the assignment of the Royal Commission was to produce a report favourable to the biotech industry - in order to give the government's ridiculous GE policy some much needed "legitimacy".

This strategy worked for a while, but it is now starting to unravel, with the government's GE policy in serious trouble with 70-80% of New Zealanders against lifting the Moratorium. In addition, important sectors of the business community have finally awakened to the threat a GE commercial release poses to its profitability. Some of our most lucrative export markets in Europe and Asia have rejected GE crops.

The NZ Herald special GE issue of 24 August 2003, in which the paper officially questioned the sanity of GE commerical release, was an indicator of the unease of Big Business (especially our crucial agricultural export sector) with the new technology. Hitherto, the Herald had been pro-GE.

Thus, no matter how hard the government may now strive to browbeat the NZ population, the genie of fundamental distrust is out of the bottle. The surest indicator to date that the government is now vulnerable on GE is the fact that NZ First has now come out in favour of keeping the Moratorium.
                  
Moreover, thanks to the rekindling of the "Corngate" scandal, which goes right to the PM herself, as well as the total inability of Marion Hobbs to justify pro-GE policies, it will now be much more difficult for the government to automatically lift the Moratorium on October 29.
                  
              The GE Sellout is destined to reignite NZ's GE debate by revealing hitherto ignored studies which show huge increases in food-borne illnesses (from 2-10x) in countries eating GE food, unreported near-catastrophes from GE organisms, profound problems with GE food supplements.
                  
             . The GE Sellout explains the real reasons behind our government's refusal to heed the warnings about GE by hundreds of independent scientists. It also tells why the Labour government has paid more attention to the wishes of the biotech industry than it has to the wishes of the majority of New Zealanders.
                  
More than 500 independent scientists worldwide have called for a halt to the commercial release of GE until it can be proven safe.
                  
Nevertheless the NZ government has continued to insist on our growing it, thus risking a cascade of "catastropic" health and economic events. (The NZ Law Society has said that the commercial release of GE has "the potential to create catastrophic levels of harm".)

The GE Sellout asks whether the New Zealand government has been influenced by the biotech industry so much that it has ignored our overseas markets and forgotten its promise to protect and defend this country. It reveals the ugly politics behind why are we being forced to abandon our "clean, green" status, one which has brought us wealth in a hugely competitive global market.
                  
Like Nicky Hager's Seeds of Distrust, The GE Sellout will open your eyes to what has really been going on behind the scenes, as our elected officials and government bureaucracies make ready to use us all as guinea pigs in an experiment that will alter the very structure of life itself.

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