Vermonters Call a Timeout

Last week, voters in California's Mendocino County voted to pass Measure H, a county-wide measure to ban the "propagation, cultivation, raising and growing of genetically modified organisms in Mendocino County." Measure H passed in spite of enormous financial expenditures by CropLife America in an attempt to defeat it. Washington DC based CropLife America represents biotech giants such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dupont, Dow Chemical and others. Mendocino County is now the first county in the United States to ban the growing of genetically altered crops and animals.

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The biotechnology industry is considering a lawsuit or statewide legislation to overturn the first US-Ballot initiative, the first in the country to outlaw the growing of genetically modified crops. The anti-GMO forces won, despite the fact, that a consortium of the nation's biggest agribusinesses, doing business as Croplife America poured about $500,000 dollars into a media campaign designed to halt the measure.

This comes on the heels of the meetings on the UN Convention on Biodiversity and on the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. The US have signed neither of them, and clear attempts were made by countries like the US, Canada and Australia together with Argentine and Brazil (the Miami Group) together with Industry to block efforts on labelling of GM crops and on liability in cases of contamination. Nevertheless, substantial steps were made, and the objections of the US and other countries, who have not signed and will not sign the Bisafety Protocol, were discarded at some stage.

It also precedes the GEAN conference that will be taking place in Berkely, CA March 12-14th; and, the BioDevestation Conference that willbe taking place in San Francisco, CA June 6-9th. Last year in Sacramento, CA the USDA held a WTO conference on Biotechnology.

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