Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ENVIRONMENT DAY-CHILE: ‘No Protection’ from Transgenic Foods

María Cecilia Espinosa

SANTIAGO, Jun 4 2005 (IPS) - Chile is ”totally legally unprotected” when it comes to genetically modified organisms, and they are found in 50 to 60 percent of the processed food consumed in this country, Juan Carlos Cuchacovich, an activist with environmental watchdog Greenpeace, told IPS.

The Chilean affiliate of Greenpeace held protests and an international seminar about the risks involved with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), while in Santiago the 21st World Congress of the International Seed Federation was under way, bringing together some 1,200 agricultural entrepreneurs until Thursday, just days before World Environment Day, celebrated on Jun. 5.

Felipe Sánchez, president of the Chilean Association of Seed Producers, said his country is the world’s fifth leading seed exporter, supplying around five percent of the market. The main types of seeds sold abroad are for maize, vegetables and flowers.

Around 5,000 hectares, mostly owned by agribusiness transnationals, are dedicated to the reproduction of transgenic seeds, particularly maize. Local legislation allows production only for export because, in theory, sales of genetically modified food are not allowed nationally.

Cuchacovich, coordinator of Greenpeace-Chile’s genetic engineering campaign, told IPS this country ”has no major regulatory body, not even any institutional system” to attend to the problem of GMOs.

”It is total lack of protection. The only regulation that expressly established a ban,” and which prohibited the inclusion of transgenic inputs in food for children, ”was eliminated by the Health Ministry in 2003 without any technical reason,” said the activist.

From the perspective of the environmentalists, there is barely a regulatory framework existing in the government’s Agriculture and Livestock Service, applied by a committee of the Agriculture Ministry.

Chile’s President Ricardo Lagos proposed a legislative bill in 2004 for biosecurity, but it never made it to Congress because ”there were a great number of discrepancies within the government. The law was going to be rejected by a strong group of lawmakers who opposed the way it was being presented,” said Cuchacovich.

Chile signed the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in 2000, but has not ratified the treaty. ”It would be an inconsistency that the country, because it is aligned with the U.S. position, marginalizes itself from an international convention that it already signed,” said the environmentalist.

The Protocol obligates the parties to minimise risks in the movement of GMOs from one country to another, but ”Chile is importing transgenic maize and soybeans, primarily to feed livestock,” Cuchacovich said.

There is a tendency to provide incentives for biotechnology through legal means, in keeping with ”strong pressure from technology promoters, like the United States and Canada, but in general the Latin American countries have only minimal legislation” in this area, he added.

According to a Greenpeace study, which led to the publication of a food security guide for Chile, ”between 50 and 60 percent of our food contains transgenics in different forms.” These mostly involve food inputs imported from Argentina and the United States.

Greenpeace released a survey in March that was conducted in four of Chile’s 13 regions in November and December 2004, in which 95.9 percent of the Chileans surveyed said they wanted foods containing genetically modified material to be labelled as such, and 58.5 percent said they would prefer not to consume any transgenic foods.

Given the delay in passing legislation requiring labelling of transgenic foods, Cuchacovich says it is unacceptable that ”in a country like Chile, which proclaims its democracy and liberty, they hide the most basic information for people to make decisions” about the products they buy.

It is a violation of the right to information, which is the result of ”economic motives of the companies that know their (transgenic) products are going to be rejected because people don’t want to consume them. Our survey reflects that.”

Cuchacovich said public opinion could pressure government officials to move on labelling legislation, as occurred in Brazil and Mexico. ”Citizens can’t lose hope that indeed, with organisation, changes are possible.”

Legislative deputy Leopoldo Sánchez, of the co-governing Party for Democracy, told IPS ”there is no clear policy on the part of the executive branch on this issue.”

The proposed law on biotechnology was entrusted to the deputy economy minister Alvaro Díaz, with the ”viewpoint of an economist, of a market economy, and with little connotation of the concept of environmental sustainability,” said Sánchez.

The deputy explained that in recent decades Chilean farming has undergone deep changes, with greater trade capacity and the use of hybrid seeds and chemicals, which have increased the profitability of the farming sector.

”But no modern technology has faced so much opposition” as transgenics have, he added. ”Rejection of them is seen in nearly the whole world.”

”Nobody is in a position to say responsibly that transgenics will not have negative effects. As such, doubts must be respected,” said Sánchez.

The deputy suggested a law banning transgenic crops in a specific area of the country, with the ultimate goal of a GMO-free Chile. ”Why not exploit that opportunity and have a distinctive stamp in the (trade) competition, now, while there is still time to make a decision, before we are full of transgenics – if we aren’t already,” he said.

Ten years after the first authorisation for a genetically modified organism in the world, the only thing for sure for Greenpeace is that these products have not been able to end hunger worldwide, as the organisation said May 31 during the seminar on ”Risks of transgenic agriculture for Chile”.

Says Emiliano Ezcurra, of Greenpeace-Argentina, ”transgenic agriculture is on a commercial scale, of commodities, it is not about specific crops. The bulk of them are ending up in the stomachs of cattle, pigs and poultry through forage.”

Most transgenic crops are soybeans, maize, rapeseed and cotton. Ninety percent of the world’s GMO production is concentrated in four countries: United States, Argentina, Canada and China. Eighty percent of transgenics are produced in the first three.

The growth of the population of the planet, with its total cultivable area remaining mostly constant, has put food security at risk.

Defenders of GMOs said the problem would be resolved by the increased yields of transgenic crops. They also said it would end the deforestation caused by the expansion of the agricultural frontier as farmers seek more land to cultivate.

In Ezcurra’s opinion, transgenic crops ”were not able to feed all humanity, they did not prevent the use of agrochemicals, and they didn’t produce greater yields. They only resolved the problem of pests and weeds.”

Areas of biodiversity have been converted into monoculture, he said. ”Today we plant soybeans where before nothing could be planted. It is being cultivated where there used to be native flora and fauna.”

Transgenic crops have advanced in Argentina at a rate of ”20 football fields per hour, while government officials and private companies have failed to regulate the sector efficiently, and they don’t guarantee the right to information consecrated in Article 42 of the constitution,” said Ezcurra.

In the European Union, legislation has been in place since 1996 requiring products containing transgenic material to be labelled as such, Natalia Tsigaridou, of Greenpeace-Europe, told the seminar.

Eight percent of the European population rejects GMOs, said the activist. ”Fourteen of the 30 supermarket chains proposed not selling transgenic products.”

However, Greece is the only EU country that has declared its territory ”transgenic free”, she said.

”More than 4,500 European areas of different legal types – such as provinces, prefectures or departments, have adopted initiatives to protect their farmland from (GMO) contamination and to satisfy the desires of their citizens,” said Tsigaridou.