from Claire Robinson, WEEKLY WATCH editor
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Watch out for our urgent CAMPAIGN OF THE WEEK: LETTER TO LULA. We need you to e-mail the Brazilian President to ask him to stick to his promise not to give permission again for the planting of illegal GM soya.

Please also ask Lula to give the Brazilian people proper biosafety protection, GM-free areas, and GM labelling.

An example letter is available in Portuguese as well as English. You can do it now - it only takes a minute - at this link: http://www.gmwatch.org/proemail1.asp?id=5

If Lula fails to take a stand on GM soya, he will be making a serious mistake. Just how serious is made clear by mounting evidence of the problems with GM soya and the benefits of non-GM soya.

The problems are laid out in a fascinating article which looks at the powerful evidence that GM has caused stagnation in soya yields in the US. Yields have flattened off since 1995 - GM soya was introduced in 1996. The introduction of GM soya has also brought many other problems in its wake.

Meanwhile, the benefits of reduced allergies and tastier, more nutritious foods - promised by GM lobbyists as part of the next generation of GM products - are already emerging out of research on non-GM soya (see SOYA! SOYA! SOYA!).

Claire [email protected]
www.lobbywatch.org / www.gmwatch.org

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CONTENTS
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LOBBYWATCH
FOCUS ON ASIA
SOYA! SOYA! SOYA!
EUROPE
THE AMERICAS
AUSTRALASIA
CAMPAIGN OF THE WEEK - LETTER TO LULA
REST OF THE MONTH'S TOP STORIES
DONATIONS

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LOBBYWATCH
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+ VATICAN URGES FURTHER STUDY OF GM FOOD
The Voice of America has uncritically reported the recent US-Vatican conference, "Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology", in Rome. GM lobbyist C S Prakash is quoted as saying, "When you stop using chemicals in the farm [as a result of GM crops] you will have more friendlier insects on the farm, far more weeds and far more birds coming into your farm, and the fact that you can produce more with less land means that you are going to have more of wild lands that are not being cut down."

The trouble is that there is no convincing evidence that GM crops yield more. In some cases the reverse appears to be the case - see SOYA! SOYA SOYA! And the most widely used GM crops are for herbicide tolerance (HT) and such GMHT crops do not lead to "far more weeds", but exactly the opposite.

As the GM farm scale trials in the UK demonstrated, GMHT crops lead to fewer weeds and hence to fewer weed seeds, providing less food for birds and other wildlife, and less seed return to the seed bank. GMHT crops were also found to be generally worse for butterflies and bees.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4431

While there is significant opposition to GM food from within the Church, the Vatican is yet to make up its mind on the issue.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4433

+ OPPOSITION TO CONFERENCE FROM CATHOLIC AID AGENCY
Caritas International, the Catholic relief agency, has joined many other Catholic bodies in expressing misgivings about the US-Vatican conference, as well as about the whole US-backed drive to push GMOs as a means of combating worldwide hunger. Catholic World News reports how Caritas official Jacques Bertrand managed to raise these concerns at the conference, though only from the floor.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4454

For opposition to the conference from other Catholic groups, see
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4393

+ COLUMBAN CONDEMNS CONFERENCE AS "DISGRACE"
Renowned Irish environmentalist and priest Fr Sean McDonagh has labelled the US-Vatican conference "a disgrace" and "a sustained exercise in propaganda for GE seeds".

He said, "All the speakers were totally in support of GE foods as the only realistic way to solve hunger. No other point of view was heard and there was no one from the development community to present their perspective.

"Far from feeding the world, I believe that GE food will further exacerbate world hunger. I attempted to get the floor on a number of occasions during the conference but with little success...

"After the conference I complained to the Bishop in charge of the Pontifical Academy that sponsoring such a one-sided position on such an important topic was [not] good science or an appropriate position for the Church to take since those who are poised to gain most from GE foods are multinational corporations (mostly from the US)...

"As I said to the Bishop at the Conference, this is much more important than Humanae Vitae. Sex is a species issue otherwise celibacy would be evil. Food is the basic need of every human being. If we are denied food for a few weeks we die."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4454

+ RAVEN PONTIFICATES FROM HIS GILDED PERCH
One of the main speakers at the US-Vatican conference was Peter Raven, Pontifical Academician and Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden. His address has been circulated via the AgBioView list of Prof CS Prakash, another of the speakers. In it Raven contrasts the rationality and scientific consensus found amongst supporters of GM with the opposition, which he characterises as "ideological", "unsupported", "harmful", "idiosyncratic", "scientifically unfounded", "fanciful", "self-serving", "murky", "outrageous", "politically or economically motivated", "obscene" and immoral.

Yet many of Raven's own claims are, to say the least, open to question. He tells his audience, for instance, that "Cotton is already a global success story, and those who cultivated GM cotton are clearly better off than ever before". Try telling that to farmers in Indonesia where Monsanto had to pull out, it was so unsuccessful (see ASIA).

In India, GM cotton has also been much hyped but has been the subject of a series of critical reports, with one State even declaring it "unfit for cultivation". Even in China, which is most often quoted as a GM success story, Prof Dayuan Xue has warned that GM crops have brought no "significant benefits" to China's many small farmers.

Raven is an expert in biodiversity and so gives much attention to the claimed benefits for biodiversity arising from GM. His principal claim, that GM increases production and so lessens the land required for cultivation, is simply an assumption unsupported by evidence (http://ngin.tripod.com/farming.htm).

He also claims that GMOs mean less chemicals and hence more biodiversity. This is clearly a nonsense in terms of GM herbicide tolerant crops - the most widely grown GM crops - a point Raven ignores, although he takes a side-swipe at "the British study of GM crops reported in 2003" which showed that "biodiversity was lower in the fields where GM crops were grown - because weed control was more effective there!" He seeks to ridicule this inconvenient evidence: "No college of agriculture in the world teaches that it is better for productive agriculture to include more weeds." Curious then, that media coverage of the US-Vatican conference quoted CS Prakash (see item above) as claiming for GM crops that: "you will have... far more weeds and far more birds coming into your farm"!

Perhaps the least savoury aspect of Raven's address though is not its sophistry or the endless name-calling, but its ludicrous attack on critics of this technology, like the Catholic Institute of International Relations, as paid agents of foreign powers, namely the European Union and its member nations