At UN talks in Bonn last month, 140 countries, including many developing nations, met to make key decisions on international rules concerning genetically modified crops and internationally recognized liability standards regarding the damage caused by the release of these biotech crops. Six major biotech companies - BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow, AgroSciences, DuPont/Pioneer, Monsanto and Syngenta – are proposing a compact agreement to settle all damages related to GM contamination through private compensation schemes to individual countries rather than an international liability regime. Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) and The Washington Biotechnology Action Council, speaking on behalf of a coalition of NGOs, condemn the proposal from the biotech companies as an attempt to privatize international law and avoid liability to the individual farmers and consumers harmed through GM contamination. The compact idea has also been condemned by Greenpeace.
GM contamination in the developing world has been an ongoing problem since the crops were first introduced in the mid 1990s with no clear international rules governing compensation for damages, although basic rules allowing regulation of the safety of GM food, crops and seeds exists through the UN Biosafety Protocol which has existed since 2000. However, the Fourth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), serving as Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (yes, it’s a mouthful!), is seeking to protect biological diversity from risks posed by bioengineered organisms. It is interesting to note that the U.S., which along with Latin America accounts for 70% of GM crops, has never signed the CBD or the Cartagena Protocol.
By the end of the meeting, there was a consensus to work toward a legally binding agreement to be discussed, and hopefully ratified, at the next meeting in 2010. It took four years of negotiation to get that far. Allowing the companies propagating the problem to dictate the terms of that agreement as these countries try to hammer out the mechanism, seems a huge step backwards and a mistake that will continue to leave farmers and the public unprotected from GM contamination.
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