Help us continue to protect our health and environment from risky GMOs

Yesterday we sent you the fun one (we enjoy fundraising off our trolls) and now here’s the boring (but necessary!) one.
 
We’re requesting your support on Giving Tuesday for all the serious but essential work we need to continue to do.
 
We know you’re probably inundated with requests for support in these hard times but we really do think our work is vitally important for all our futures and it’s your donations that make it possible.
 
More than two decades after we launched GMWatch, the battle continues to stop the radical molecular transformation of nature and the food we eat. And now we’re fighting tooth and nail to counter a powerful industry campaign for the deregulation of new GMOs that has garnered a lot of support from Big Ag and industry-friendly politicians and regulators.
 
What makes our work so critical is that not only are many politicians and the media less alert than they should be to the dangers from emerging technologies, but complacency has also been growing even among NGOs, many of whom have failed to keep up to date with developments in this rapidly evolving field, with the result that they are also often playing little or no part in informing the public and lawmakers about the dangers we’re facing.
 
The deregulation drive is going on right around the world. And because gene-editing is new to so many and has been surrounded by colossal amounts of hype, we’ve been creating and pushing out resources to make clear the unintended and potentially dangerous effects of this technology in easy-to-understand terms.
 
Happily, there’s growing recognition of the dangers of gene-editing human beings, so our work has focused on putting together compendiums and accessible summaries of scientific papers that support the need to subject gene-edited plants and farm animals to similarly stringent safety assessments.
 
To get the word out to as wide an audience as possible we’ve also taken part in webinars and videos that explain the basics of what this technology can do and the risks it involves.
 
And in the UK, where particular dangers exist thanks to Brexit and a government guided by anti-regulatory extremists, we are working together with two other tiny NGOs, GM Freeze and Beyond GM, to fight attempts to weaken the regulations around gene editing. We are also actively working with EU-based groups on keeping and improving the implementation of the GMO regulations in the European Union. And we stand ready to support others around the world, wherever we can be of use.
 
And this is just one part of our work because, as well as flagging up the hazards of new GMOs, we’re also continuing to campaign and report globally on the problems and failures of the first-generation of GMOs and the toxic pesticides used with them. We also continue to report on your campaigning successes around the world and the positive alternatives to pesticides and GMOs.
 
So we hope you can support us in these hard times to keep on pointing up the problems with GMOs old and new as well as the planet-destroying agricultural paradigm that accompanies them.

Thank you so much for your support.
 
Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews
GMWatch editors