from Claire Robinson, WEEKLY WATCH editor
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Dear all:
This week we have some useful analysis of what the WTO ruling is likely to mean for Europe and developing countries. One thing is certain: the ruling has intensified opposition to GM (WTO).
And the WTO is powerless to overcome a major problem of the industry - its inability to produce any useful or desirable products (BIOTECH SLOWDOWN).
Meanwhile, the bitter experience of Bt cotton growers in India triggered a parliamentary walkout on Wednesday (ASIA).
Claire This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
www.gmwatch.org / www.lobbywatch.org
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CONTENTS
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WTO
FOOD SAFETY
ASIA
AFRICA
THE AMERICAS
EUROPE
COMPANY NEWS
LOBBYWATCH
BIOTECH SLOWDOWN
PEST MANAGEMENT
Don't forget GM Watch's monthly review is now available in German:
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6205 and in Dutch: http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6235
So please tell all your German- and Dutch-speaking friends!
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WTO
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+ AMERICA'S MASTERPLAN IS TO FORCE GM ON THE WORLD
There's a useful article by John Vidal in The (UK) Guardian about the recent WTO ruling against the EU's GM moratorium. Vidal says that the US intends to bypass European hostility to GMOs by using the ruling to bully developing countries into growing them:
EXCERPT:
Europe, its member states and its consumers all rejected the ruling last week, making the WTO look even more out of touch and incompetent to rule on issues about the environment, health and consumer choice...
In fact, Washington and the US companies are not that bothered by Europe's predictable reaction. Europe has all but dropped off the world's GM map. The companies and the supermarkets know there is little or no demand for GM crops, and that Europe's subsidised farmers are reluctant to alienate the public further by growing them.
It is now clear that the real reason the US took Europe to the WTO court was to make it easier for its companies to prise open regulatory doors in China, India, south-east Asia, Latin America and Africa, where most US exports now go. This is where millions of tonnes of US food aid heads, and where US GM companies are desperate to have access, buying up seed companies and schmoozing presidents and prime ministers.
More than two-thirds of exported US corn now goes to Asia and Africa, where once it went to Europe. As the Monsanto man said this week about the WTO ruling: "Our feeling is that it's important for countries other than the EU to have science-based regulatory frameworks."
Like the tobacco industry, GM companies are now focusing almost exclusively on developing countries...
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6243
+ WTO BULLYING MAY BACKFIRE
In an article for The Guardian, Sue Mayer warns that WTO-based "moves to coerce countries and citizens into accepting GM food could backfire":
EXCERPT:
There are now 172 regions and provinces in Europe that have declared themselves GM-free. A recent poll showed that 58% of European citizens are worried about GMOs. Austria and Greece have made defiant statements in response to the report and, in a national referendum last year, the Swiss voted for a five-year moratorium on the commercial growing of GM crops.
Scepticism about GM is not restricted to Europe. All the states in Australia growing oilseed rape have moratoriums on growing, despite federal-level approval for GM oilseed rape. Farmers in Mali have rejected GM crops as an attack on their way of life, and consumer surveys in Russia, China and South Africa demonstrate a lack of appetite for GM products. From this perspective, the WTO's intervention looks set to intensify controversy.
There's more, and some great quotes on the WTO ruling, at: http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6251
+ APRIL 8, JOINT INTERNATIONAL GM OPPOSITION DAY
In response to the WTO ruling, 100 international organizations from more than 40 countries are announcing April 8, 2006 as a Joint International GM Opposition Day. The day will feature major public events in several countries to demonstrate continuing global opposition to GM foods and crops. Events are already planned in Poland, Germany, Austria, and the US.
Said Julie Newman, of the Australian Network of Concerned Farmers, "The countries that have adopted GM are facing higher costs and market rejection which is why they want to force the GM problem on other competitive countries. Farmers want to market what consumers want, and it is not GM. Contamination is not controllable and economic loss will occur but it should be the GM companies, not the non-GM farmers, that should be forced to accept the liability for the losses GM crops will cause."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6255
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FOOD SAFETY
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+ SUSPICIONS ABOUT GMOs
Why are the French the only nation in the world judged intelligent enough to read the facts of GM food safety research in their newspapers? Le Monde carries an excellent article arguing that "several recent studies effected by credible researchers and published in scientific reviews tally with one another to throw doubt on GMOs' complete harmlessness."
EXCERPT:
During the summer of 2005, it was an Italian team led by Manuela Malatesta, cellular biologist at the Histological Institute of the University of Urbino, that published intriguing results (European Journal of Histochemistry, 2005, p. 237). In prior studies, that team had already demonstrated that absorption of transgenic soy by mice induces modifications in the nuclei of their liver cells. This summer's publication proved that a return to non-transgenic food made the observed differences disappear. It also showed that several of these changes could be "induced in adult organisms in a very short time."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6246
+ 2005, A SCARY YEAR FOR GM CROPS
Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, summarises the large number of health problems and other issues that have surfaced regarding GM crops and foods in the last year, at
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6247
EXCERPT:
Medical reports from India say that farm workers handling Monsanto's GM cotton developed moderate to serious allergic reactions, forcing some to the hospital. There were also reports that numerous animals died after eating the Bt cottonseed.
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ASIA
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+ WALKOUT OVER BT COTTON
Major opposition parties, including Congress, staged a walkout in the Madhya Pradesh assembly alleging heavy losses suffered by farmers due to low yield from Bt cotton and accusing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of promoting the interests of multinational companies.
Samajwadi Party leader Suneelam and Govind Singh and Arif Aqeel of Congress explained that thousands of farmers in Malwa and Nimar region who grew the GM Bt cotton incurred huge losses.
Demanding compensation for the affected farmers, they said that during tests, Bt cotton seeds proved to be a failure as far as germination, productivity, quality and cost effectiveness are concerned. Farmers who grew Bt cotton, were facing huge debts due to the failure of the crops, they said.
The walkout was triggered by agriculture minister Chandrabhan Singh's attempt to dismiss the problems with Bt cotton as due to a lack of irrigation facilities and his claim that the seeds had increased production.
Unhappy with the Minister's reply, Congress members staged a walkout, as did the rest of the opposition parties who charged the state government with promoting multinationals.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6253
http://news.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=250773&cat=India
+ PERILS OF INDO-U.S. FARM PACT
KP Prabhakaran Nair warns of the perils to farmers and biodiversity posed by the new Indo-US farm treaty, which will open up the country's most important public sector agricultural research establishments to private players from the US.
EXCERPT:
[The treaty] threatens to expose the country's bio wealth to the machinations of US-based corporates and research institutes. Agro-interests in the US have had designs on the country's bio-resources for quite some time now. In 1995, the medicine centre of the University of Michigan even managed to secure a US patent on certain therapeutic uses of turmeric. And then in 1997, a private agricultural company in the US patented basmati rice as "texmati". Such biopiracy happened clandestinely. But now it can take place with official sanction. The MoU to open up our agricultural research institutes to private players from the US will ensure exactly that...
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6250
+ INDIA HITS BACK IN BIOPIRACY BATTLE
A report from the BBC reveals which party stands to gain most in the Indo-US farm treaty:
EXCERPT:
In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts and keying in information. These doctors are practitioners of ayurveda, unani and siddha, ancient Indian medical systems that date back thousands of years.
One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit. "Soon the world will know the medicine, and the fact that it originated from India," she says.
With help from software engineers and patent examiners, Ms Kala and her colleagues are putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopaedia of India's traditional medical knowledge, the first of its kind in the world.
The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country's traditional medicine in five languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them...
Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project and heads India's National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (Niscair), reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4506382.stm
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AFRICA
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+ NEW ATTEMPT TO NOBBLE JOURNALISTS IN AFRICA
GM industry body ISAAA is a key player in a new training initiative to "improve" the reporting on GMOs by African journalists. In the three-day seminar, journalists were told to "go beyond the usual concentration on scare issues of biotechnology to harness it for progress and conservation."
The seminar's organizers were, of course, unconcerned about the many dubious news stories out of Africa involving bogus "miracle" claims about GM, and wildly exaggerated claims about the number of farmers taking up GM crops. ISSAA has been a world leader in encouraging this type of media hype on GM.
Also involved in the media training project are ABSPII - a US-based USAID-backed initiative to push GM crops into Africa.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6242
+ WILL ZIMBABWE EMBRACE BIOTECH?
If an article in the Zimbabwe Standard is to be believed, "Zimbabwe is moving towards embracing biotechnology in a development that shows a shift in government's attitude" that "could divide the country". The evidence for a change of view on the part of Mugabe's government is that "it rolled out a red carpet for Professor Thomas DeGregori", a GM zealot and Prakash sidekick, during his recent GM promotional visit to the country.
Certainly, DeGregori did get to meet Zimbabwe's vice president, Joyce Mujuru, in a visit during which he reportedly promoted GM as the solution to more or less all the challenges that African countries were experiencing.
However, it is far from clear whether the DeGregori visit is more than just part of a spin campaign by the pro-GM research lobby which arranged his invitation and probably his government access.
The Zimbabwean government may have been led to believe they were meeting with a notable development specialist rather than a GM propagandist - let alone one who believes GM opposition is the result of brainwashing and that GM has "increased life expectancy" and "generally improved human well-being"!
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6254
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THE AMERICAS
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+ BILL WOULD REQUIRE LABELLING OF GM SEEDS IN NEW YORK
A bill introduced in the Albany, New York legislature would require the labeling of all GM seeds in New York state. Said Sarah Johnston, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, which represents 650 farms, "Farmers are in some cases purchasing genetically modified seeds unbeknownst to them. At the very least, people need to know what they are purchasing." The measure is backed by the New York Farm Bureau.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6252
+ PUERTO RICO HOST TO BIOTECH CROP EXPERIMENTS
The establishment of the AgReliant Genetics company in the municipality of Santa Isabel reinforces Puerto Rico's role as a laboratory for experiments with GM crops, exposing the Caribbean island to multiple environmental and human health risks and compromising the integrity of its agriculture, warned the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety.
"We are gravely concerned by governor Anibal Acevedo-Vila's policy of fast track approval for every type of biotechnology-related activity in Puerto Rico, without the most minimal precautionary measures to determine what impacts these could have on our ecology, public health and agriculture", declared the Project on Biosafety.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6252
+ PARAGUAYAN PEASANTS RESIST GM SOY
As a result of the rapid expansion of GM soybeans into the area, peasants and indigenous people in Eastern Paraguay have become the targets of land evictions, pesticide poisoning and assassinations. In the department of Caaguazu, three indigenous communities have been forcibly displaced, a dozen peasant communities have disappeared, and the last of the trees will soon be replaced by fields of beans.
In the last three years alone, hundreds of protesters have been arrested in clashes with police, and military and paramilitary groups protecting the soybeans have killed six people. And with 2006 shaping up to be a very poor harvest, the danger of confrontation over land resources can be expected to escalate.
Now, with the help of progressive priests, leaders of the protest coalition Frente Departamental de Lucha por la Soberania y la Vida are asking international supporters to help them put together a Regional Congress this March to hash out a coordinated response to the coming soy harvest.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6241
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EUROPE
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+ DIFFERENCES STILL ABOUND IN GERMAN GOVT OVER GM CROPS
The parties comprising the current German coalition are not united in their approach to biotech, says a report in German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.
The new German chancellor Angela Merkel was expected to be more open to biotech than was the case with the previous Red-Green government coalition. However, there appears to be no change of course between this and the previous red-green government.
Agriculture minister Horst Seehofer (CSU-party) said that he does not want to ease the rules governing the large-scale plantation of GM crops, and that he wants to continue with a long-term process of discussion.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6248
+ FRENCH LAW PUTS GM COSTS ONTO FARMERS
France is proposing a new law that would effectively absolve the government of financial responsibility for contamination caused by GM crops, a move condemned by environmental groups. In the proposed legislation, France's research ministry suggested that farmers growing GM crops would have to contribute to a fund to compensate for any contamination claims from neighboring growers of traditional varieties.
"It is intolerable that the research ministry...is preparing to legalize environmental pollution, putting citizens' health at risk and sentencing French people, who are massively opposed to GMOs, to genetic contamination," said Arnaud Apoteker of Greenpeace France. "The proposed legislation is planning to force farmers to carry the can. It thereby organizes a total impunity for the food industry, seed makers and transporters."
Opponents say GMOs should be banned altogether because cross-pollination is inevitable and makes it impossible for consumers to have a real choice over the food they purchase. A large majority of French people agree.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6236
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COMPANY NEWS
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+ MONSANTO'S CHEMICAL SPIN-OFF TRIES TO ESCAPE BANKRUPTCY
Solutia Inc., the chemical company spun off from Monsanto in 1997, has unveiled a plan that would move the firm out of bankruptcy if approved by a judge overseeing the process. Monsanto spun off the chemical company in 1997 and now focuses on developing GM seeds.
Monsanto's earlier chemical business carries a legacy of legal costs, such as lawsuits over pollution from polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, chemicals that persist in the environment. Under the bankruptcy plan, Monsanto will accept liability for lawsuits and environmental cleanup associated with those chemicals, Solutia said.
Monsanto spokesman Glynn Young said Monsanto will continue to litigate pollution lawsuits as well as clean up pollution that occurred before 1997. Young said Monsanto will pay the first $50 million to clean up PCB pollution in Anniston, Ala., and Sauget, Ill. Solutia will pay the next $325 million, Young said. After that, the companies plan to split the cost of future cleanup efforts.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6249
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LOBBYWATCH
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+ WEBSITE CATCHES FIRE
CS Prakash of AgBioWorld fame topped one of his recent AgbioView bulletins with the following message: "Due to overwhelming hits received on our website because of the WTO ruling, our server went mad, was dead for a while, angrily spit out multiple copies of our press release to you and did not send out a follow-up news coverage of the issue. I apologize to my readers of AgBioView for this."
We believe there may be a simple explanation for what occurred: the AgBioWorld website caught fire.
Why? Here's how CS Prakash announced the recent WTO decision: "Independent academics and scientists from around the globe applaud the long-awaited World Trade Organization ruling today which directs the European Union to end its defacto moratorium on biotechnology-improved crops."
On the AgBioWorld list of "Independent Academic Experts" available to advise the world's media were such luminaries as "Gregory Conko, Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute". The CEI is a Washington based pro-corporate pressure group that takes money from Monsanto, Dow, Exxon, Big Tobacco etc. Unsurprisingly, it dismisses global warming, opposes restrictions on smoking and promotes GMOs.
One "Independent Academic Expert" on the Prakash list with grave problems with reality is Calestous Juma of Harvard. Juma has just published a bizarre article on the WTO dispute in which he claims that the real concerns in Europe about GMOs have little to do with their potential impact on health or the environment: "The focus on safety is largely a smokescreen used to conceal concerns about Europe's loss of competitiveness in biotechnology."
To anyone living in Europe, such a claim is plain silly. Nobody with any knowledge of the debate here could doubt that the concerns over safety are genuine, widespread and profound, as has been reflected time and again in samplings of public opinion.
GM opposition in Europe has been driven from the grassroots, often in the teeth of political, bureaucratic and industry enthusiasm for GMOs. That is why market analysts have concluded that the WTO ruling will fail to benefit the biotech industry, because EU food manufacturers and supermarket chains will continue to exclude GM ingredients due to of the level of consumer opposition.
As a reality check, put together some of the theories of Prakash's "Independent Academic Experts", and see what a topsy-turvy world you get. According to AgBioWorld's experts, GM crops have been unfairly vilified despite the fact that they are already helping people live longer and enjoy "improved human well being", (a) because of the excessive burden of US regulation demanded by the biotech industry and (b) because of brainwashed Europeans acting under the direction of trade interests driven to desperation by their loss of biotech competitiveness. This is a fantasy world where the corporate-led drive to impose GMOs is inverted into a corporate conspiracy to exclude them!
A website awash with such inflammable nonsense was bound - sooner or later - to combust, or as Prakash tells us, go "mad", play "dead", then angrily spit out a torrent of noxious press releases. Never was the need for a PANTS ON FIRE brigade more apparent.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6239
+JUMA'S SORRY ACCOUNT OF GLOBAL FOOD FIGHTS
In an article published in the Financial Times, "'Satan's Drink' and a Sorry History of Global Food Fights", Calestous Juma of Harvard University argues that the real concerns in Europe over GMOs have little to do with their safety, this being "largely a smokescreen used to conceal concerns about Europe's loss of competitiveness in biotechnology."
In support of his claim that European opposition is really about trade barriers protecting vested interests, Juma draws historical parallels with some of the European reactions to coffee when it was introduced from the New World. Those erecting trade barriers, Juma points out, included Frederick the Great, who banned coffee, and Charles II of England, who attempted to ban coffee houses. Juma quotes Frederick the Great's declaration, "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the like amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence."
But Juma's suggested parallels could hardly be less to the point. These were clearly top down attempts to protect vested interests from popular tastes, and they failed accordingly. Frederick the Great complains of "the quantity of coffee used by my subjects", i.e. his subjects were extremely keen to consume the stuff, while Charles II had to withdraw his ban on coffee houses before it was even instituted.
But the European public are hardly clamouring to consume GMOs - the very reverse, in fact. Europe's political and corporate elite has consistently tried to push through acceptance of GMOs in the face of popular opposition.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6240
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BIOTECH SLOWDOWN
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In 2005, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, the rate of growth of GM crops was 11 percent. That might seem like a lot. But it's the slowest growth rate since GM was introduced in the mid-1990s. The rate is down from 20 percent in 2004 and 15 percent in 2003. Even taking into account the saturation of certain markets - GM soy, for instance, now accounts for 85 percent of the soybeans grown in the United States - such a slowdown translates into lost revenue for biotech firms and less buzz for the movement as a whole.
- John Feffer, "GM food goes on trial", http://www.alternet.org/story/32317/
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6256
+ BIOTECH'S SPARSE HARVEST
Andrew Pollack for the New York Times looks at the "sparse harvest" that GM has delivered.
EXCERPTS:
Developing such [GM] crops has proved to be far from easy. Resistance to genetically modified foods, technical difficulties, legal and business obstacles and the ability to develop improved foods without genetic engineering have winnowed the pipeline...
In 2002, Eliot Herman and his colleagues got some attention when they engineered a soybean to make it less likely to cause an allergic reaction. But the soybean project was put aside because baby food companies, which he thought would want the soybeans for infant formula, instead are avoiding biotech crops, said Mr. Herman, a scientist with the Department of Agriculture.
In addition, he said, food companies feared lawsuits if some consumers developed allergic reactions to a product labeled as nonallergenic...
DuPont won approval for a soybean high in oleic acid, which could produce healthier oils, back in 1997. But instead of becoming a showcase of the consumer health benefits of genetic engineering, the crop is now used only to make industrial lubricants.
Erik Fyrwald, group vice president of DuPont's agriculture and nutrition division, said one reason the crop was not sold for use in food was that demand for healthier oils was not as great then as it is now. But other experts say there was another problem - foods made with the oil did not taste good.
"The high-oleic oils are not very well received by the consumer," said Pamela White, a professor of food science and human nutrition at Iowa State University. Further, she predicted that soy oils containing the omega-3 fatty acids would be unstable, making them hard to use in fried foods.
William Freese, a research analyst at Friends of the Earth, which opposes genetically engineered crops, said genetic engineering had been oversold. "The facts show that conventional breeding is more successful at delivering crops with 'healthy traits' than genetic manipulation, despite all the hype from Monsanto and other biotech companies," he wrote in an e-mail message.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6245
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PEST MANAGEMENT
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+ GM CROPS NOT THE ANSWER TO PEST CONTROL
Farmers' heavy use of pesticides has led to increased resistance in pests, which in turn has caused substantial crop losses and a slide into crushing debt, writes G. V. Ramanjaneyulu, executive director of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, Hyderabad, India, in an article for SciDev.net.
It does not make sense, argues Ramanjaneyulu, to apply high doses of toxins over extended periods, irrespective of whether the pests are present. Effectively, this is what supporters of GM insect-resistant crops are encouraging farmers to do.
A better solution, writes Ramanjaneyulu, is the use of integrated pest management (IPM), or non-pesticidal management and organic farming. Their demonstrated effectiveness shows that farmers can manage insect pests successfully and affordably without resorting to chemical pesticides - or to insect-resistant GM crops. The experience of these farmers suggests that widespread use of such GM crops violates the principles of sound pest management.http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6237