RightOnCanada.ca

January 7, 2008 

Good news for food security

Dear RightOnCanada.ca supporter,

Good news for the planet’s biodiversity, people’s food security and the right of farmers to save seeds.

In a blow to biotech agribusiness, the U.S. Patent Office has upheld a challenge by the Public Patent Foundation and invalidated four of Monsanto’s key patents for genetically engineered food plants.

Montsanto’s “ruthless persecutions (of farmers) have fundamentally changed farming,” says PUBPAT. “The result has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming practises and traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millenia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seeds.”

PUBPAT filed the legal challenge after Montsanto forced Saskatchewan farmers Percy and Louise Schmeiser to destroy all the seeds they were saving for the following year because, against their wishes, some Montsanto-patented GMO seeds had spread from neighbouring farms into their fields and seed supply.For more information, see article by Helke Ferrie in the December 2007 Monitor of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

And on a futher sweet note, Percy and Louise Schmeiser were awarded the 2007 Right Livelihood Award (sometimes called the “Alternative Nobel Prize”) for “their courage in defending biodiversity and farmers’ rights, and challenging the environmental and moral perversity of current interpretations of patent laws.”

The Canadian farm couple, said the Jury, had given the world a wake-up call about the dangers to farmers and biodiversity everywhere from the growing dominance and market aggression of companies such as Monsanto engaged in the genetic engineering of crops. (www.rightlivelihood.org)

Meanwhile, Montsanto holds a patent in Canada for Terminator seed technology, which causes seeds to become sterile after one harvest.If you haven’t already done so, please send your letter to Prime Minister Harper calling for a ban on Terminator technology. And please ask all your friends to do the same. Thank you!In solidarity,Kathleen, Peggy, Pauline and Becky for RightOnCanada.ca

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