Bob Phelps, director of environmental campaign group GeneEthics has slammed the Crawford Fund Conference being held today [Wednesday] at Parliament House, Canberra, for using the hunger of poor people in the Third World to promote acceptance of GM technology.
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Phelps insisted that genetic engineering of crops, animals and microbes is hostile to the goals of sustainable farming systems and will increase world hunger, not solve it.
Furthermore, he said: “No third world people are included at the Crawford meeting, and their views and needs are in danger of being misrepresented.”
Last year, 24 African states, and 30 development, farmer and environmental organisations, made a statement to the UN saying: “We object strongly that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology (genetic engineering) that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us.
“We do not believe that such companies or gene technologies will help our farmers to produce the food that is needed in the 21st century. On the contrary, we think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves.”
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By GlobalDataPhelps added: “The Zimbabwean, Indian and Zambian governments have all rejected US food aid which turned out to be genetically engineered.”
