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Criticisms by scientists, civil society, and indigenous farmers dismissed NO REPLY TO FAO AND CBD INQUIRIES Devon G. Peña |   Las Colonias de San Pablo, CO | July 6, 2014 While Mexico is a party to the international treaty known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and a signatory to the Cartegena Protocol (which is fully enforceable), the federal government is so far ignoring both court rulings against Monsanto and other corporations and the advice of its own and other scientific committees actively advising the international bodies concerned with enforcing the CBD’s biosafety regulations.  The reinstalled PRI presidency occupied by  Enrique Peña Nieto is unsurprisingly acting the usual arrogant way and ignoring science and the rule of law. This past week, we received correspondence from scientist-advocates attending CDB-SBSTTA 18 in Montreal, Canada reporting these concerns. Article 25 of the CBD “establishes an open-ended intergovernmental sc...

Transgene escape. Courtesy of: ETC Group Moderator’s Note: One of the most significant proven threats to the environment stems from the use of genetically engineered organisms, including the widespread near global deployment of transgenic crops. With recent news that both China and Russia are retreating from the embrace of commercial agricultural biotechnology, it seems that the momentum against GMOs is increasing. A major issue facing the non-GMO movement stems from the decades long work done on the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and the Cartegena Biosafety Protocols, which establish rules for the protection of biodiversity including threats posed by transgenic organisms. An international coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has issued a call for an end to the spread of transgenes – the snippets of bacterial, viral, and other genetic materials that are used to assemble GMOs. Note that I use the term assemble because these are not inventions, they are assemblages of...