Over 200 Global Food Movement Leaders and Organizations Reject “Gene Drives” | ETC Group
▻https://www.etcgroup.org/content/over-200-global-food-movement-leaders-and-organizations-reject-gene-drives
Rome, 16 October 2018 (World Food Day) – Global food movement leaders and organizations representing hundreds of millions of farmers and food workers today set out their clear opposition to “gene drives” – a controversial new genetic forcing technology. Their call for a stop to this technology accompanies a new report, Forcing the Farm, that lifts the lid on how gene drives may harm food and farming systems.
The Forcing the Farm report, researched and produced by ETC Group and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, details several ways in which gene drive technology is being readied for application in agriculture (see box). The report exposes how gene drive developers are deliberately keeping from view agricultural applications while trying to focus public interest on high profile health and conservation projects. Reports from closed meetings with a US defence committee show that agribusiness firms such as Monsanto-Bayer and Cibus Bioscience appear to be engaging with gene drive development.
“Applying gene drives to food and agriculture turns biotech industry strategies on their head,” explains Jim Thomas, Co-Executive Director of ETC Group. “Previously GMO companies engineered the food crops. Now that consumers won’t buy GMO food, companies are coming to engineer the rest of the agricultural system instead – the weeds, the pests and the pollinators.”
Gene Drives and Agriculture: Six examples drawn from Forcing the Farm
Gene drives are being engineered into flies, insects, worms and other pests to spread sterility as a biological alternative to pesticides.
Researchers are proposing using gene drives as a breeding tool to increase meat production in livestock.
“Auto-extinction” gene drives are being engineered into rats and mice as well as beetles that affect storage of grains.
Patents have been sought to engineer gene drives into honey bees to control pollination patterns using light beams.
Research is ongoing to engineer gene drives into common weed species to make them more susceptible to herbicides such as Roundup.
Analysis of two key patents on gene drives show that they each reference around 500-600 agricultural uses including brand names of 186 herbicides, 46 pesticides, 310 agricultural pest insects, nematodes, mites, moths and others