“I would like to express my full support for the proposed five year moratorium on GM crops and would urge every Irish citizen to sign this petition. Although I have been campaigning against the use of GM crops in agriculture since the early 90s, I have recently had privileged access to as yet unpublished information about the negative health impact of GM crops, and this has made me more convinced than ever that their commercial introduction in Europe would pose totally unacceptable risks both, on human health and the environment.

After 15 years of commercial production, mainly in North and South America, there is no evidence of any benefits to farmers, or the public, from the introduction of these crops. The only beneficiaries are the multinational pesticide companies who have brilliantly engineered a parasitic dependency on their use by the farming community.

In addition, there is now emerging evidence that herbicide resistance is spreading to weeds and that some GM crops, such as Canola, are colonising wild spaces right across America.”

Patrick Holden - Director of Sustainable Food Trust, UK.
www.sustainablefoodtrust.org

“Government scientists have stated that the artificial insertion of DNA into plants, the technique known as genetic engineering, can cause a variety of different problems with plant foods, may increase the levels of known toxicants in foods, introduce new toxicants or new allergens, and reduce the nutritional value of food.

With no long-term human feeding trials, no fetal or childhood development studies and no compound toxicity studies ever conducted on these foods, organizations around the world, from the National Research Council in the United States to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, are looking beyond the biotech industry’s genetically engineered foods for solutions to feeding a growing global population. These groups are calling for an agricultural system that produces abundant food while also reducing agriculture’s negative impacts on the environment – including water pollution from pesticide run-off and soil degradation from synthetic fertizlier use – and one that works to reduce the economic burden associated with the human health risks attributed to agricultural chemicals (as documented in the United States’ President’s Cancer Panel Report.)”

Robyn O’Brien – Founder of AllergyKids, author of The Unhealthy Truth.US.
www.robynobrien.com

“Food & Water Watch applaud’s the movement to ban GMO crops in Ireland. No one knows what the long term consequences are of growing GMO crops and there have been no long term health studies on the effect of eating GMO foods. GMO crops require the use of dangerous herbicides and they threaten the integrity of organic crops. This unsustainable technology poses risks to human health, the environment, and the biodiversity of the planet. Don’t let Monsanto and the other biotech firms’ greed for profit, pollute Ireland with GMO’s.”

Wenonah Hauter - CEO Food & Water Watch. US.
www.foodandwaterwatch.org

“Basic knowledge of the effects of GM food on the human gastrointestinal tract remains unknown. GM foods are untested and uncontrolled and unexpected biological effects will not be detected. Biotech industries have little sympathy with the many human sufferers from gastrointestinal disease although the extent of gastro oesophageal problems requiring treatment is well known to the drug industry. More than a decade ago, we demonstrated that GM potatoes had a growth effect on the lining cells of the entire gastrointestinal tract of young mammals thus, by extrapolation, human colonic polyps could be accelerated into cancerous growth. Unfortunately, EFSA does not recognise the relevance of animal experiments to human pathology and rejects all animal GM feeding experiments. Thus, we must continue to be cautious and a 5 year moratorium seems prudent if we are to avoid putting a GM thief into our mouth to steal our health.”

Dr S W Barclay Ewen - Consultant histopathologist with National Health Trust. Scotland. Co-authored with Arpad Pusztai a paper on the first animal GM feeding trial: Effect of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine, published in Lancet, 1999.

“Genetic Engineering is a crude technology based on false science. Living organisms are complex and self organised, with each part interacting with the rest and organism interacting with the environment. Genetic Engineering is based on the reductionist assumption of one gene carrying one trait which is fixed and immutable. But the genome is fluid. The next generation of GMOs do not reproduce the genome in a predictable way.

None of this has been properly studied. Our ignorance has been further deepened by the false principle of Substantial Equivalence which assumes a naturally occurring organism is equivalent to the GMO. This has created a ‘Don’t Look, Don’t See, Don’t Know policy’. Ignorance is ignorance, not proof of safety.

That is why we need moratorium on GMOs.”

Dr Vandana Shiva - Physicist, director of Navdanya institute which promotes local and ecological food models. India.
www.navdanya.org

“Feeding people is much more than giving them calories, fats and carbohydrates. It is aiming for their well-being, which includes not only what we consume but also the environment where we live. From this point of view GMOs have already clearly shown that they don’t produce more than conventional crops, they are hard to market, uninteresting to taste, poorer in terms of nutrition, dangerous for the environment and biodiversity, and insecure. The point is how they can have spread so much.

The diffusion and production of GMOs in the world have been possible mainly thanks to lack of information. What do we really know about them? On the top of many issues GMOs pose first a problem of precaution, scientific data are not yet sufficient to demonstrate that GM products don’t cause any harm to humans and animals or to the environment. Recently unexpected events are starting to come out; insects are developing resistance to GM toxins, water and soil are getting more and more polluted because of the high level of agrochemicals needed by GM cultivations to be productive, GM proteins have been found in the blood of Canadian pregnant women. At the same time GMOs benefits are not yet proved: they didn’t solve starvation, they didn’t decrease food prices, land and water exploitation is systematically growing and the use of agrochemicals as well.

Last but not least there is problem of freedom. On one side GMOs reduce producers’ freedom; since GM seeds are protected by patents, their cultivation creates economic dependence on seed sellers. Farmers are forced to pay the royalties of GM seeds and they lose their possibility of choosing what they can grow. On the other side GMOs reduce consumers’ freedom since they tend to uniform cultivations all over the world, erasing local differences and consequently limiting our range of choices. In many countries foodcontaining GMOs is not even labelled, thus making its recognition impossible to consumer, who can’t consequently decide what to buy.

What else do our governments need to know to figure out that, far from being a solution, GMOs provide a whole heap of problems?”

Carlo Petrini - Slow Food founder & CEO. Italy. Slow Food was set up in reaction to the limitless spread of American-style fast food as shown by MacDonald’s opening at Rome’s Spanish Steps.
www.slowfood.com

“Half a century ago we thought pesticides were the technology of the future and many different agricultural chemicals were released onto the market. Since then a high proportion of them have been found to have unforseen side effects and have been withdrawn from use. You can do that with a chemical but you can’t do it with genes. Once they’re out there there’s no way of recalling them.”

Patrick Whitefield - Author of The Earth Care Manual, 2004. UK.
www.patrickwhitefield.co.uk

“There are so many factors with GM crops that we do not fully understand. We have no idea how widespread or damaging cross-pollination between GM and non-GM crops and wild plants could be or the effects of cross-contamination on the insect population. We need to fully research these matters in controlled environments before we release GM seed into the wider environment. It would be far wiser to place a 5-year GM moratorium in place in Ireland until further independent scientific research is conducted.”

Maddy Harland - Editor, Permaculture magazine. UK.
www.permaculture.co.uk

“I write in support of the petition for a 5 year moratorium on GMOs in Ireland on behalf of the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS), a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to reclaiming science for the public good.

As part of the work of ISIS, and also as a member on the roster of scientific experts of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, I and my colleagues have been monitoring and reviewing extensive scientific literature and empirical evidence on genetically modified (GM) crops and livestock since 1994.

It has been widely recognized since the 1970s that genetic engineering is inherently hazardous because it greatly enhances horizontal gene transfer and recombination, a main route to creating new pathogens in nature. That was why genetic engineering experiments were strictly controlled and contained in the laboratory well into the 1980s.

When genetic modification of crops began, all caution was thrown to the wind. GM crops were released freely into the environment and considered ‘safe’ a priori, whereas they are even less safe than genetic engineering microbes in many respects. Genetic modification of higher plants and animals – as opposed to microbes – is unreliable and uncontrollable, thereby introducing the further risks of unpredictable effects in the GMOs that can impact adversely on health and the environment. In addition, the foreign genes transferred are either biopesticides poisonous to a whole range of non-target organisms, including humans and livestock, or genes making crops tolerant to toxic herbicides that thereby enter our food chain, with disastrous effects. All these hazards have been confirmed in research carried out by scientists independent of the industry: feeding trials have resulted in unexplained deaths, liver and kidney toxicities, infertility, stunting, adverse immune reactions, and birth defects. GM crops now grown in hundreds of millions of hectares worldwide have brought new pests and new diseases in crops and livestock.

Unfortunately, our national and international regulators have persistently ignored and dismissed damning evidence against the safety of GMOs, and worse, colluding with industry to manipulate science to promote GMOs. Worst of all, honest scientists are being victimized, and often by their own academic institutions that should be protecting and defending them.

Academic science is in danger of losing all public trust, and not just in the field of GMOs. The European Assembly, in its 2011 resolution calling for lower exposure limits to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields associated with mobile phones, highlighted the need for “genuine independence” of scientific research and expertise. It noted “clear parallels with other current issues, such as licensing of medication, chemical pesticides, heavy metals or genetically modified organisms.”

Finally, a growing scientific consensus now see the need to replace industrial, fossil-fuel intensive agriculture with organic, agro-ecological farming in order to save the climate and feed the world. This is all the more urgent in view of the current world food crisis that has triggered the riots and political instability in North Africa and the Middle East, and spreading to the rest of Africa, Latin America, and some fear, soon to Europe.

In conclusion, a five-year moratorium on GMOs is the least that any sensible government should be doing, short of an outright ban. Meanwhile a comprehensive shift to organic, non-GM agriculture should be implemented as a matter of urgency.”

Dr Mae-Wan Ho - Biophysicist, founder of Institute of Science in Society. UK
www.i-sis.org.uk