On March the 20th about 100 activists from the social centers of Emilia-Romagna, Marche and North-East of Italy entered in the EFSA's headquarters in Parma, and occupied it for half
an hour, also blocking the ongoing proclamation of the new executive
director.
EFSA, the European Food Security Agency, is not a
“private” place. It is a public one, instead.
Firstly for its
status of European institution. But above all because it is in charge
of our collective and individual safety and the ecological security,
as for what is related to food and crops.
As we detail below, there are many
criticisms that can be raised about the way EFSA evaluates the risk
of the GMOs. Those criticisms have been raised and discussed in the
past by many scientists and environmental associations.
However,
no answers came from EFSA, nor its guidelines have been modified in
any respect.
While the biotech companies are aggressively
trying to invade Europe with GMO cultivations, it is mandatory to
publicly expose the lack of a rigorous and scientific evaluation of
GMOs risks in the EFSA process as it comes from the guidelines and
praxis.
Furthermore, the risk assesment is only
one of the factors under scrutiny when the EU Commission makes its
final decision (almost every time against the opinion of the majority
of States). We would like to know what are precisely the other
factors that are evaluated and what is the relative rank of the risk
and safety issues.
In our opinion, EFSA and the EU Commission act
much more like agents of biotech companies than like the institutions
they are supposed to be.
That's why our action was aimed to
raise unavoidable attention on this issue and we think it was totally
legitimate.
The police stormed on us right after the action,
when we already went out of the building and started to close all of
us in the court.
We tried to get out and the police
counter-reaction was grossly and unreasonably violent, by use of
batons, spits, punches and insults.
A police officer pulled out his gun that
After that
we improvised a demonstration along with the police continued to be
extremely aggressive and other clashes took place. Several people was injured and the police wanted to identify all the activists because of the occupation and the subsequent resistance in the court and throughout the demonstration.
However, the activists, at that point blocked by dozens of cops on a bridge, refused to be identified and asked the identification of police officers responsible for violence, instead.
The police then decided to renounce the massive identification and let the activists out.
All that
sounds totally shameful and clearly shows how delicate are the issues
that we raised.
Food, Hearth and community: against bio-capitalism and GMOs for food sovereignty and safety.
Today
a hundred of activists from social centers of Emilia-Romagna, Marche
and North-East of Italy have occupied the EFSA headquarters in
Parma.
EFSA is the European Food Safety Agency, and with this
action we boost again a direct and radical conflict against the GMOs
crops in Europe.
Social centers, activists, farmer, many of us
are organizing starting from the rage and dignity that moves farmers
all around the world.
GMOs crops, as an industrial intensive
cultivation, exert a unacceptable violence on the agricolture, the
environment and our same bodies.
They do not have any reason to
exist but the profit of the companies that produces them and the
control over the food chain they allow: the wishful thinking with
which they are advised is no more than a smugging of wrong ideas and
data.
They do not increase the yield, lead to an increase of
herbicides and pesticides use, determines the onset of superweeds and
resistant insects, exhibit potentially dangerous effects for human
health.
Along with the industrial intensive agriculture, they are
among the main contributors to climatic changes and ecological
crisis.
While reducing biodiversity, impoverishing the terrain and
unacceptably introducing the copyrights on seeds, they undermine the
food security and sovereignty, the freedom of choice for farmer and
communities and the share of food sources.
All that is
unacceptable, neither we are keen to wait for the lobbies' game play.
Furthermore, farmers who want to be the agent of biotech do not wait
as well, constantly forcing the law and the limits and, above all,
trespassing the biological borders of our own bodies.
For all
these reasons, today we have occupied the EFSA headquarters, because
the Agency and the European Commission only guarantee to biotech
companies a gateway to Europe.
EFSA did not reject a single
application. Because of the high scientific level of the proposals,
they say. However, often in the past several scientists raised
criticisms about the fact that EFSA's decisions only rely on
documentation provided by the very same proponents, and that that
documentation is often based on gray-data (not publicy available, not
published on peer-reviewed journals).
The EFSA's guidelines
are simply shocking.
- Applicant companies have the full
freedom to determine the essential elements upon which the risk
assessment must be based, and the approaches taken into account are
among those most favourable to biotech industries and have been
established by, or in tight collaboration with, scientist involved in
industry.
- The main pillar of the risk assessment is the
so-called “comparative safety assessment”, which is the parallel
of “substantial equality” used at FDA.
It has been defined by
scientists working with ILSI, a biotech-funded institute, while they,
in the same years, had relevant positions in EFSA.
EFSA then, as
suggested by ILSI, consider the comparative safety assessment as the
basis for the safety assessment itself instead of just a starting
tool in a more rigorous process.
- The comparative safety
assessment does not have a real scientific base, at least because its
definition is at least nebulous and, above all, not at all
quantitative.
Moreover, it totally lacks any account for the fact
that the methods of DNA engineering has nothing to do with common
gene regulation and heredity. The risk that newly introduced genes
are capable to escape to or interfere with the normal gene
regulation is specific of this technique and the comparative
assessment is totally inadequate to address it.
However, was
it applied as rigorously as possible, it will be sufficient to reject
many applications. As a matter of fact, it is well known that many GM
plants differ significantly in levels of nutrients, proteins and
sometimes in toxins and allergens.
Exactly on the purpose of
avoiding this, the comparison is not made between the GM plant and
its isogenic counterpart cultivated at same time, place and
conditions (that would comply wth EU directive 2001/18).
It is
made with a very large database, built up by ILSI, that contains a
very large variety of that specie, cultivated in different times and
places and totally different conditions. That database comprise also
very unusual varieties with very low or high level of some
component.
That on purpose of making the range for the comparison
so large that anything would basically fit in it.
EFSA allows the
use of that database without asking for more rigorous application of
the even the comparative assessment itself.
- EFSA does not
require any assessment of the synergic and combinatorial effects of
different toxins/herbicides expressed, in spite of the fact that
combinatorial effects can not be foreseen starting from the isolated
effects of each factor.
-
EFSA does not require a comprehensive assessment of risk for
non-targeted organisms at all level of the food chain
- EFSA
does not require that the stacked effect of different genetically
engineered traits are evaluated, that is to say that a GM crop with
more than one trait is not considered a new specie, and the
assessment relies on assessments of each trait singularly treated.
-
There is not a clear definition for the case in which a GM
application must be rejected
- There is not any clause for the
submitted raw data to be made available to the scientific community
for further independent studies and evaluations.
All
that is totally unacceptable and would be simply ridiculous if it
wasn't outrageous, considering that national authorities must rely on
safety assessments from EFSA.
However, on would say, tha
safety assessment is just “one among others” of the factors that
the EU Commission evaluates when approving an application. It would
be interesting to know whether there is a ranking among those
factors, and what it is.
Finally, let's just make a
“comparative assessment” between what Monsanto declares:
“Monsanto
should not have to vouchsafe
the safety of biotech food. Our
interest
is in selling as much of it as possible.
Assuring its
safety is the FDA's job”
(P. Angell, NYT magazine, 25 Oct
1998)with
the EFSA guidelines:
“it
is not foreseen that EFSA carry out such
studies as the onus is on
the applicants to
demonstrate the safety of the GM product”
A
kind of aporia arises at this point: who is actually in charge of
ensuring safety of GM food and crops? Who is controlling that raw
data are scientifically sounded? And in what sense, exactly, EFSA
guarantees that their “safety assessments” are reliable?
The
GMOs are a real battlefield, an
open conflict between the bio-capitalism and the freedom to defend
the earth, the food, and the health and the ecosystem.