Has
Daily Bread packed its last USA grown rice?
Daily Bread Wholefood store in Northampton
has most likely packed its last sack of USA
rice for sale to its customers because of the
threat of contamination by genetically modified
(GM) rice.
It is most unlikey that the US rice Daily Bread
normally stocks was ever contaminated the issue
is a general one on how US rice was contaminated
in the first place.
However, the strain of Bayer’s illegal
GM LL601 rice was first detected in rice intended
for export from the US earlier in 2006. This
variety has not been approved for human consumption
anywhere in the world. It has only been grown
in field trials that ended in 2001, and yet
in September 2006, testing commissioned by Greenpeace
and then by various European government agencies
showed a broad variety of products on supermarket
shelves in Europe had been contaminated by Bayer’s
illegal GM rice. Following the Greenpeace exposé
a leading German supermarket chain Edeka announced
that they would cease selling all US long grain
rice. A number of European retailers, millers
and processors have followed suit.
The Food Standards Agency relased a statement
on their website on the 26th October which states:-
‘Following the contamination of long
grain rice in the USA with unauthorised GM material,
European Member States have agreed on additional
testing requirements to make sure that no illegal
GM material enters the European Union.
All imports of US long grain rice must now
be held at the port of entry into the EU, so
they can be sampled and tested for the presence
of GM material. Official certificates, showing
that consignments of US long grain rice have
tested negative for the presence of this unauthorised
GM material, will need to accompany the rice
as it is placed on the market down to wholesale
level. This is in addition to the current requirement
for the US exporter to certify that long grain
rice exports are GM free.’
The other concern is that it has been suggested
that approval for this strain of GM will get
‘Fast tracked’ most likely to avoid
the heavy losses that could be incurred with
a recall, legal action and so forth!
Daily Bread has long campaigned against the
use of GM material in the production of food
and the above only empasises the point that
promises made ‘such as there can be no
cross contamination’ are basically intenable.
John Clarke 1st November 2006 Daily Bread Co-operative
Ltd www.dailybread.co.uk
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At Daily Bread
we make the statement that
'We will not knowingly stock any product which
contains genetically modified ingredients.
SUPERWEEDS SPREADING IN GENETICALLY
ENGINEERED COTTON FIELDS
Pesticide resistant weeds are introducing a
new problem to cotton farmers. Traditionally,
herbicide resistance is dealt with by simply
changing the herbicide. But according to North
Carolina State weed scientist Alan York, farmers
are running out of options: there are no more
effective pesticides to switch to.
The majority
of farmers in the Cotton Belt are now growing
Monsanto's genetically engineered Roundup Ready
cotton, which is resistant to glyphosate pesticides.
As a result of the heavy use of glyphosate
in the area, varieties of pigweed have developed
an immunity to it. Tests at the University
of Georgia showed that the pigweed Palmer Amaranth
has developed amazing resistance to glyphosate.
Scientists doused the weeds three times with
a quadruple concentrated dose of glyphosate,
but the pigweed continued to grow and multiply.
"If you grow cotton in
the Southeast, and you have Palmer amaranth in
your fields, looking at side-by-side comparisons
of resistant and non-resistant pigweed should
scare you to death," York says. http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/cotton060404.cfm
WTO TO
EUROPEANS: EAT YOUR FRANKENFOODS
The World Trade Organization (WTO), responding
to intense pressure from the Bush Administration
and the biotech industry, has ruled that the
European Union's (EU) moratorium on genetically
modified organisms (GMOs) from 1998-2004 was
illegal. The moratorium was put in place because
of EU concerns on human safety, environmental
pollution, and inadequate testing, and has subsequently
been officially lifted. Canada and Argentina
backed the U.S. in filing a complaint with the
WTO in 2003, alleging that the moratorium was
a violation of international trade laws. The
Bush Administration has claimed that the EU ban
has hurt U.S. farmers who grow genetically engineered
crops, and that the EU should pay hundreds of
millions of dollars in penalties to the U.S.
But market analysts point out that the WTO ruling
will not benefit the biotech industry, because
EU food manufacturers and supermarket chains,
fearing a consumer backlash, will continue to
refuse to sell food products containing GMOs,
no matter what the WTO says. U.S. Trade officials
have admitted that the main impact of the WTO
ruling will be to intimidate smaller nations
from banning GMOs. http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/ruling060208.cfm |
