Proposed US law to mandate GMOs?
Do you have professional experience with writing or interpreting legislation? Please speak up in the comments!
The Global Food Security Act of 2009, S.384 has a few clauses that have anti-biotech activists all worked up. What do the changes really mean? Is the US government really part of a Monsanto-led conspiracy to force the impoverished into a cycle of dependency on patented seed and pesticides?
The Pesticide Action Network of North America sums up their view of the situation in their newsletter:
After its introduction in the Senate a year ago, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton have been quietly pressing for this piece of legislation that aims to fight global hunger with one hand while orchestrating a giant taxpayer subsidy to pesticide and ag biotech companies with the other. The bill, also known as the Lugar-Casey Act — for Senators Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Robert Casey (D-PA) — would refocus aid programs on agricultural development, with a caveat: public funding of genetically engineered (GE) seeds is what this bill means by “agricultural development.”
I don’t know if PANNA actually read the Act, because there’s a lot in there about agricultural development that has nothing to do with genetic engineering, as you’ll see in this post.
