India May Ban GMO Crop Field Trials for 10 Years

India’s new expert committee appointed by the Supreme Court of India is now calling upon the Indian government to enact a 10 year ban on all GMO crop field trials for the next 10 years.

The new law would forbid any biotech agencies from testing their latest GMO crops on India’s soil, therefore preventing the serious issue of contamination and environmental damage. Contamination that is much more than an unlikely but problematic scenario.

Monsanto has been caught in the past contaminating even organic seed varieties, and has gone as far as to plant their experimental crops before the USDA allowed them to. Thankfully, the organic farmers were able to catch the contamination before it spread.

If the contamination was not caught, however, it could have gone anywhere and compromised the very genetic integrity of non-GMO farming grounds. It is for this reason that many companies outside of the United States generally dislike purchasing from U.S. farmers, as they sometimes contain even trace levels of GMO contaminants.

More and more we receive reports of farmers being completely cut off from other nations after being found to contain trace levels of GMO contamination.

India is looking to stop this before it becomes much of an issue. At least the expert panel is. Known as the Technical Expert Committee, said that the trials should be stopped immediately until an independent committee made up of experts and stakeholders took a closer look at the serious risks associated with the use of herbicide resistant crops.

More specifically, the committee was concerned about their real sustainability. After all, Monsanto’s GMOs are consistently becoming more resistant to chemical herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides.

It has even led a panel of expert scientists to call upon the EPA to take action, fearing that resistant bugs known as rootworms will soon ruin the GMO corn industry as a whole.

Whether or not India will adhere to the recommendations of this committee is not yet known, but other nations certainly have listened to their own panels and experts over the past few weeks.

Damning Report Called for Termination of GM Field Trials

A 2012 report outlining the dire consequences of GM crops on food safety and security is available for review from India’s Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture.

There is much damning evidence proving that the biotech industry has carried out abuses against farmers and the people of India which you won’t want to miss. Among the main points are:

• Safety tests were requested but not carried out for Bt toxic eggplant.
• The biotech industry put pressure on the Agriculture Minister on the co-chair of the GM regulator GEAC to approve GM crops.
• Lambs fed Bt cottonseed had inexplicable changes to their organs and tissues.
• Stakeholders in the regulation of GM crops have a serious conflict of interest.
• All transgenic food assessments and regulatory approvals are grossly inadequate for testing safety of said crops.

Due to the numerous negative findings of the Committee, they asked for an end to all GM field trials, and recommended an in-depth probe into the decision to allow Bt cotton into India for commercialization, “including how Bt cotton became a priority when the avowed goal of introduction of transgenics in agricultural crops was to ensure and maintain food security.”

Read: UN Doctor Outlines 5 Key GMO Dangers in Recent Talk

The Committee also urged the government to take into consideration the effects found within the paper before considering approval of any more exportation of GM crops.

“The Coalition hopes that the report will form the basis for a deep and widespread debate on the subject of GMOs in our food and farming in the country and said that India should be proud of this historic, well-analysed report coming out in the year that the country is hosting the Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP-MOP in Hyderabad later this year.

We hope that this report will guide the thinking in other countries as well, including our neighbouring countries with similar socio-economic conditions for their farming communities’, said the Coalition. ” [1]

It has been a devastating month for Monsanto as nations around the globe continue to enact bans and restraints on the company’s genetically modified crop varieties. India, the same country that hit Monsanto with ‘biopiracy’ charges for patenting life on the planet, is just the latest nation to take a stand.