Rats fed with GM corn found with abnormalities

Rats secretly tested by Monsanto with genetically modified (GM) corn diets have reportedly developed blood and organ abnormalities, thereby prompting environmentalists and food security activists in New Delhi, India to issue renewed calls for moratorium on GM foods and crops.

Results of Monsanto’s tests are the subject of a brewing controversy in Europe where it is facing increasing resistance to its products and legal initiatives are being mounted to compel bureaucrats to make public the full results of the tests.

Monsanto has maintained that its 1,139-page report could not be revealed, even to the European Food Safety Authority on the grounds that it contains confidential business information which could be of commercial use to their competitors.

A country–with over 600 million farmers – has been appended to public interest litigation filed recently seeking Supreme Court intervention in India’s own GM program by a group of prominent anti-GM activists, including Devinder Sharma of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security and P. V. Satheesh of the Deccan Development Society based on southern Andhra Pradesh state.

While the litigation is on-going Sharma has teamed up with Suman Sahair, who leads the internationally known group Gene Campaign, to demand that the government urgently publish all food and feed safety and research on GM crops in India–including cabbage, cauliflower, aubergine, potato, tomato, and rice.

Both Sharma and Sahai say: "It is becoming increasingly important that food and feed safety data not be accepted from companies, but generated in government laboratories.

Said Sharma in an interview: "The methodology used must be made known, including the laboratories where safety tests are conducted, and all decisions on GM crops and foods taken in accordance with the provisions of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which already requires public participation and to which India is a signatory.

More than growing GM crops in India, the central government needs urgently to address the losely regulated import of GM foods into this country until clear safety data generated independently and subjected to a public risk-benefit analysis is available. Although India has a string of well-established agricultural laboratories that compare to the finest in the world, Indian authorities had chosen to accept data generated by Monsanto before accepting the company’s GM cotton for large-scale cultivation that has proved disastrous for the farmers growing the crop.

In an activist position paper, Sahair said: In a country where there is a 50-million-ton food grains surplus there is little reason to invest in costly technology which is of doubtful value and increasingly found to be risky."

"India is a storehouse of food and agricultural diversity and has many options to offer for food and nutritional security. There appears little reason to opt for potentially dangerous GM foods especially when regulations are demonstrably weak!"