Ecobreves – ARGENTINA: Alert Against Transgenic Trees

By IPS Correspondents and - - Reprint | | Print |

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 20 2004 (IPS) - International environmental organizations gathered in Argentina are exhorting governments around the world to ban the inclusion of transgenic tree plantations as possible ''carbon sinks'' to capture greenhouse gases. During the 10th Conference on Climate Change, which ended Dec. 18 in Buenos Aires, Friends of the Earth and the World Rainforest Movement denounced the negative effects of genetically modified tree plantations on the environment.

The activists noted that Conference on Climate Change's permission that transgenic tree plantations could count as carbon sinks under the Clean Development Mechanism was obtained in 2003.

The CDM is a provision of the Kyoto Protocol to allow industrialized countries to invest in clean development in developing countries as a means to compensate for their own excess emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases.