| | 23/October/24
| | South Africa: Court ruling sets aside commercial approval of GM drought-tolerant maize A precedent-setting ruling by the South African Supreme Court of Appeal in favour of African Center for Biosafety (ACB) vs Monsanto/Bayer has set aside the commercial approval of GM drought-tolerant maize. ACB said: "South Africa's Supreme Court has agreed that the regulators merely rubber-stamped Monsanto's application for authorisation, uncritically accepting its paucity of evidence that the GMO poses no threat to human health or the environment and ignoring the contrary expert evidence." GMWatch US court case for labelling of all GM foods In the US, the Center For Food Safety is in court today arguing for the mandatory labelling of ALL GMO foods. Up to 70% of GMO food is allowed to escape the label thanks to a legal loophole, which they're fighting to close. Center For Food Safety on X Opposition against patent on maize rejected The European Patent Office (EPO) has rejected an opposition against a patent held by the company, KWS, on cold-tolerant maize (EP 3380618). The international coalition of No Patents on Seeds! filed the opposition because patents on conventionally bred plants and plant varieties are not permitted in Europe. In its decision, the EPO invoked a controversial clause which states that the prohibition is only applicable to patent applications filed after 1 July 2017. KWS filed its application in 2016. Christoph Then, who took part in the hearing, considers this interpretation of the law to be arbitrary and incorrect: “The ban on patenting plants and plant varieties goes back long before 2017. In 1995, the Board of Appeal at the EPO confirmed this prohibition. Since then, the laws have only been changed to allow patents on genetic engineering processes used in the production of plants. However, patents on conventionally bred plants never were permitted.” GMWatch 20 new European patents on conventionally bred seeds No Patents on Seeds! has published a new report on patents covering conventionally bred plants. Although Europe only permits patents on genetically engineered plants, the European Patent Office (EPO) has already granted hundreds of patents on conventionally bred plants, affecting over 1300 European plant varieties. The development threatens to block conventional plant breeding in Europe. “The EPO and the industry are destroying the basis of European plant breeding by granting these kinds of patents. Access to conventionally bred plant varieties has never been so severely restricted by patents as it is at present”, says Johanna Eckhardt from No Patents on Seeds! “These patents endanger the right to freely use conventionally bred varieties for further breeding for European breeders.” GMWatch US farming giant Cargill gets a message 11 stories tall On a rooftop 11 stories above São Paulo, a Brazilian street artist, Mundano, sat on an overturned bucket, mixing water, varnish and ash collected from fires that had ripped through a Brazilian rainforest to create a palette of grey tones. Over the ledge awaited a newly whitewashed, 15,000-square-foot wall of an elegant apartment building in plain view of the buses and cars heading down a main artery leading to the city centre. That evening, he and five assistant artists would start painting a massive mural of an Indigenous leader in a scorched Amazonian landscape, holding up a sign urging Cargill, the agricultural giant, to rid its supply chain of crops grown on recently deforested land and thereby "Keep Your Promise". The project is a collaboration with the nonprofit Stand.Earth, which is funding the mural as part of a campaign targeting Cargill. The “promise” refers to a pledge Cargill made in 2023, setting 2025 as a deadline “to eliminate deforestation and land conversion from its direct and indirect supply chain” of soy and other crops in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Cargill is one of the largest exporters of Brazilian [mostly GM] soy. New York Times We hope you’ve found this newsletter interesting. Please support our work with a one-off or regular donation. Thank you! __________________________________________________________ Website: http://www.gmwatch.org
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