WEEKLY WATCH number 239
from Claire Robinson, WEEKLY WATCH editor
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Dear all:
The big news this week is that the FDA has lifted its ban on meat and dairy products from cloned animals, but according to a Washington Post article, consumers are probably already eating the stuff anyway. Needless to say, no one told them. (CLONING)
And GM Watch's Jonathan Matthews got put in the same category as Pol Pot on BBC Radio - you can listen or read the transcript. (FEEDING THE WORLD?)
Claire [email protected]
www.gmwatch.org / www.lobbywatch.org
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CONTENTS
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FEEDING THE WORLD?
CLONING
AUSTRALASIA
EUROPE
RESEARCH
THE AMERICAS
NANOTECHNOLOGY
GENETIC CROSSROADS
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FEEDING THE WORLD?
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+ THE GREAT GM MIRACLE?
GM Watch's Jonathan Matthews is interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth, which set out to answer the question of whether GM crops are the answer to feeding the world's starving. Jonathan is pitted against pro-GM lobbyist Dick Taverne, and economist Jeffrey Sachs.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=8687
A transcript of the interview is at
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=8690
Or you can listen online before 2100 hrs (GMT) Thursday 24 January at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/costingtheearth.shtml
or via http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml (look for Costing the Earth)
+ DESERTING THE HUNGRY?
Two CropLife member corporations, Monsanto and Syngenta, have pulled out of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology. This is an ambitious, 4-year, US$10-million project that aims to do for hunger and poverty what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done for another global challenge.
Interesting comment from the science journal, Nature: The idea that biotechnology cannot by itself reduce hunger and poverty is mainstream opinion among agricultural scientists and policy-makers. For example, biotechnology expansion was not among the seven main recommendations in 'Halving Hunger: It Can Be Done', a report commissioned by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. The writing team for this report included Kenya's Florence Wambugu, perhaps the strongest proponent for biotechnology in Africa.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=8684
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CLONING
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+ CLONED MEAT ALLOWED ON SHELVES - TAKE ACTION!
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has lifted a ban on selling meat and dairy products coming from cloned animals. Tell grocers you aren't buying it! Tell them you'll stop shopping at stores that can't promise not to sell such products:
http://www.FoE.org/No_Food_From_Cloned_Animals
Don't Buy It: Keep Cloned Meat Off Grocery Shelves
http://action.foe.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=22275
The FDA has buckled to big biotech and agro-business despite more than 150,000 public comments opposing the lifting of the ban, and amendments to the federal Farm Bill and Omnibus Appropriations Bill calling for more research before lifting the ban.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=8680
+ CLONES ALREADY BEING EATEN - WASHINGTON POST
The US Dept of Agriculture has asked US farmers to keep their cloned animals off the market indefinitely even as Food and Drug Administration officials announced that food from cloned livestock is safe to eat. Yet even as the two agencies sought a unified message - that food from clones is safe for people but perhaps dangerous to US markets and trade relations - evidence surfaced suggesting that Americans and others are probably already eating meat from the offspring of clones. Executives from the nation's major cattle cloning companies conceded that they have not been able to keep track of how many offspring of clones have entered the food supply, despite a years-old request by the FDA to keep them off the market pending completion of the agency's safety report.
'This is a fairy tale that this technology is not being used and is not already in the food chain,' said Donald Coover, a Galesburg cattleman and veterinarian who has a specialty cattle semen business. 'Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn't know what they're talking about, or they're not being honest.'
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=8682
+ FOOD FROM CLONES SAFE, EU DRAFT SAYS
The European Food Safety Authority has declared that meat and milk from healthy cloned cattle and pigs is 'very unlikely' to pose risks to consumers, opening the door to possible European sales of those foods in the future. Clones are far from perfect copies. All clones are defective, in one way or another, with multiple flaws embedded in their genomes. Rudolf Jaenisch, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimates that something like 4-5% of the genes in a cloned animal's genome are expressed incorrectly.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=8670
+ EU PANEL DOES NOT SUPPORT ANIMAL CLONING
A European Union panel yesterday said it had 'doubts' about the ethics of using cloning to improve farm livestock, because cloned animals and their surrogate mothers suffered more health problems than
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