In response to the recent open letter delivered to the FAO (the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) from more than 600 civil society organisations from over 100 countries, condemning the FAO's report on GM ("Agricultural biotechnology: meeting the needs of the  poor?") as a disgraceful public relations tool for the GM industry, a new NGO letter is now being organised to thank and support the FAO for its report.

This new letter has been circulated via CS Prakash's AgBioView listserv and it is authored by Frances (Fran) Smith and Alex Avery.

Fran Smith, the director of the "NGO" Consumer Alert, is the wife of the President and Founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Fred Smith. Greg Conko, the Vice President of Prakash's AgBioWorld campaign, works for Smith at the CEI which gets money from Monsanto. http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=173&page=C http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=30

Alex Avery is, of course, the son of Dennis Avery, and like his father works for the Center for Global Food Issues, a project of the Hudson Institute - a right wing think tank 'dedicated to thinking about the future from a contrarian point of view,' and which has been funded by, amongst others: AgrEvo, Dow AgroSciences, Monsanto, Novartis Crop Protection, Zeneca, Du Pont, DowElanco, ConAgra, Cargill and Procter & Gamble. http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=59

Interestingly, this "NGO" letter of support for the FAO has itself proved controversial with AgBioViewers - see below, coming under attack on AgBioView for being too moderate and yielding too much ground to the opponents of GMOS!

For the original NGO letter: http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=3824

For the new "NGO" letter http://www.monsantoafrica.com/news/afrenshowlib.phtml?uid=7907
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From: Craig Sams
Subject: AgBioView has gone bonkers!

Apart from the edge-of-madness that always emerges from the writing of Gordon Couger (one of the 'big cats' of the pro GM platoon) this particular email from AgBioView has now been sent to me 20 times - they must think it's really important - or some GM growth hormone has accidentally contaminated their mailing software.

Craig
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Forwarded Message From: AgBioView <[email protected]> Reply-To: AgBioView <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 23:32:34 -0500 To:   [email protected]

Today in AgBioView from www.agbioworld.org - July 1, 2004:
* Re: NGO Letter to FAO...
From: "Gordon Couger" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: NGO Letter to FAO Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 08:05:10 -0500

Alex,

In your letter to the FAO you yield too much ground to the opponents of GM food. Admitting that there may be risks is foolish with out pointing out there are more risks with development or conventional crops than GM crops and in the case of production there are many more risks in organic crops and produce their GM counter parts. The mycotoxin that insect damage cause on grain alone are enough to ban non organic crop and the untested persistent herbicides they use on the organic crops would not be tolerated in another crop. The continued failure to stop unpastueized milk and cheese cost hundreds of people a year thier lives and order of magnitude more then Mad cow disease but the greens have painted modern agriculture with troll of BSE while continuing to spread TB, Bangs and other diseases with no concern.

After controlling Malaria they banned the use of DDT with any country that buy agriculture produce from leaving millions to die a agonizing death form malaria so the who have cleansed them selves of the dieses sit and wonder why thier trading partners die in number that rival and will soon equal the number that died in the Nazi death camps. And they could care less that they are killing off the markets of the future.

We don't have to talk about the good GM crops can do. The good that they have done is more than enough to make the worth while to mankind. Reducing erosion, redesigning the loss of organic material. Changing agriculture from a carbon intensive operation to a potential carbon sink possibly meeting most of the US requiems for the doomed Kyoto treaty. The potential for BT cotton alone to reduce the worlds use of insecticide up to 25% is a very substantial contribution to the welfare of the world. Replacing persistent herbicides with the very lowly toxic and short lived Round up is a giant step in reducing the herbicide pollution of our landscape.

Most important of all the ability to build back our soils to half or more what they were before we broke out the sod in terms of organic matter and microbial life and the massive reduction in mycotixis in grain alone are more than enough to pay society back for the use of the GM crops. Irregardless of the reduced fuel cost and soil losses and savings on labor bringing the population less expensive food freeing up capital to invest in parts of the economy that provides greater return and releases more people for industrial jobs.

No matter how much the opposition vilifies GM crops with their lies farmers world wide are adopting them at a pace never seen before because they are better yielding, require less work in terms of spraying and in some cases cultivating and for the 3d world farmers can make the differed between suicide and a good life.

Yielding any points to those that stand ageist GM crops just condemns more people to die as it gives them more reasons to delay the implantation of GM coops world wide. It is one thing to ham string the farmers in the EU who can afford archaic farming methods with massive CAP payments that the EU pays them but the 3d world farmer must make it on his own and often fight the government to get payment for his crop and electricity to water his crop and water to irrigate with. It is not uncommon for 3d world governments to be 6 months behind on crop payments and the seed and chemical dealers are far form honest selling seeds wiht poor germination and chemical that are not what they claim to be or a diluted down to the point they are ineffective.

While in India the government has a farm loan program of 5 to 8% by the time it goes through middle men it cost the farmer 11 to 14% with out BT cotton fighting insists with costs running as high as $90 dollars an acres he has to make a awful lot of cotton to pay the bill at the end of the year. An effected farm service agene could put a stop to theta. An India is not the only country that the government pools the cotton and sells if for the farmer and skims a bit off the top.

Alex, I feel that apical such as these are just feeding the flames of those that oppose GM crops and drugs. I have seen better work forum you. As they win us over to their side bit by bit