CTNBio ushers in 2010 by announcing a new president and releasing everything

Update from the GM-Free Brazil Campaign

Brazil | Rio de Janeiro | March 5 2010

Brazil's Minister of Science and Technology, Sérgio Rezende, has appointed Edilson Paiva to head the National Biosafety Technical Commission over the next two years. Paiva's commitment to promoting GM crops is such that he once told the media one of the advantages of Monsanto's soya is that people could even drink the pesticide sprayed on the crop without dying. He also opposes food labelling and claims that the precautionary principle is actually no more than a 'principle of obstruction.' For the new CTNBio president, planting local varieties of maize is a form of biopiracy perpetrated by family farmers against hybrid maize varieties.

Paiva presided over the first meeting of 2010 alongside the commission's coordinator, who is currently being tried for environmental crimes. Two varieties of GM soya produced by Bayer (Liberty Link) were released, along with a GM vaccine and a yeast genetically modified for biofuel production. The new members of the commission taking part in this first meeting of the year also voted in favour of these releases, despite lacking any in-depth knowledge of the request and having taken no part in its assessment.

The two approved soya varieties are resistant to a herbicide produced by Bayer (ammonium glufosinate). The ritual for their approval included a novelty. One of CTNBio’s internal regulations stipulates the information to be presented by a company when it requests approval for commercial release of a transgenic product. In these cases the company declared its refusal to present some of the legally required studies on the grounds that these requirements were unwarranted. This applied, for example, to nutritional studies in animals over two generations and to evaluations of potential harmful effects in pregnant animals. The alert was made in one of the reports and discussion of the issue tabled for the plenary session.

Paulo Andrade, the representative for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, entered the debate claiming that "the company is right." More emphatically still, Flavio Finardi of the University of São Paulo (USP) also defended Bayer's stance. Arguing even more fervently, Luis Antonio Barreto de Castro, the Ministry of Science and Technology’s representative, observed that alarming amounts of chemical poisons have been used on crops since the end of the Second World War but the pests and weeds are still there and increasingly numerous because these products are unable to get rid of them. Hence, he argued, it would be ridiculous to think that the introduction of one gene in a soya plant could cause any real harm. The result: 18 votes in favour and 3 against. So why should other companies not feel that they now have the same right to present only the data they deem to be relevant? Note that transgeny precisely involves the introduction of one or more exotic genes into an organism.

The new president is also determined to overturn the current rules for monitoring GMOs after commercial release. The proposal was made by the commission’s ex-president, Walter Colli, at the end of last year. At the time the repercussion was considerable: the Environment Commission of the Chamber of Deputies approved a petition for Colli to be summoned to explain the proposal to abolish monitoring; around 50 social organizations linked to the National Agroecology Alliance released a statement condemning the initiative, which was read out during a plenary session of the CTNBio; the Ministry of the Environment presented an official statement pointing out that “the commission’s observance of the precautionary principle is not optional,” and the Ministry of Agrarian Development asked CTNBio to publish a study containing the scientific justifications for changing the rules. Finally the Public Prosecutor’s Office issued a recommendation for CTNBio to leave the resolution on

monitoring unaltered.

None of this seems to have perturbed the new president, who simply declared that "Resolution 5 has to be modified." Paiva has already set up two subcommissions to study the changes and tabled the issue for the commission's next session in mid March.

Another of Paiva's promises is to place release of Bayer's Liberty Link rice back on the agenda, already announcing his position "in favour of commercial release." The request has been frozen in CTNBio since March 2009 after a public hearing in which Embrapa (the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) and another three important rice producers vehemently declared their opposition to the GM rice.

So far it seems that Paiva will succeed in consolidating once and for all CTNBio's role over the last two years of manically rubber stamping requests. The impacts of this irresponsible behaviour by the Brazilian authorities will not be confined to Brazil only: grain importing countries will also suffer the consequences.