Greenpeace Seeks Ban on GMO Rice in Philippines

Manila, 15 September 2008–Greenpeace today called on the Philippine
Senate to enact a legislation to ban the commercialization of
genetically-modified rice (GMO) rice. The call was made at the opening
of a photo exhibit in the Senate halls, featuring the importance of rice
in Filipino life and culture and why it must be protected from risky
genetic modification.

“Greenpeace is here at the Senate to lobby our senators to enact a
legislation to protect our most important staple food from the inherent
risks of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is an unproven,
unpredictable and unnecessary technology. The resulting
genetically-modified food crops threaten human health, the environment,
and farmers’ livelihoods,” said Greenpeace Southeast Asia Genetic
Engineering Campaigner Daniel Ocampo.

Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs are products of genetic
engineering in which the genes of one species are inserted randomly into
the DNA of an entirely different organism in a way that can never happen
naturally. An example is a tomato inserted with genes from a fish to
create a vegetable with a longer shelf life, or corn inserted with
bacteria genes to create a crop that has its own built-in insecticide.
Aside from the fact that the resulting living GMO would never occur in
the natural world, the new organism created becomes a living
experiment—it is unpredictable and its long term effects on the
environment and human health are unknown.

Greenpeace has been actively campaigning against the commercialization
of GMOs in the country and is currently questioning the Department of
Agriculture’s (DA) regulation process for GMO crops, which, aside from
being unconstitutional, lacks transparency and appears to be heavily
influenced by corporate interests rather than the protection of
consumers and farmers. During the past few years, the environment group
has noted with growing alarm how the regulatory bodies for GMO crops,
the DA as well as the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI), have never
rejected an application of a GMO despite documented cases on questions
of their safety and rejection by other countries, even by countries
where they were developed.

Last year, Greenpeace also released a report which details how almost
all key personalities involved in regulating the entry of GMOs in the
Philippines are members of pro-GMO lobby groups funded directly or
indirectly by multinational GMO corporations, or have been involved in
research projects and GMO-promotion activities sponsored by GMO lobby
groups, or directly by GMO manufacturers. In the six years since GMOs
have been approved in the country, the DA has been approving GMOs at a
rate of almost one every month, without adequate public consultation or
information.

Greenpeace believes that rice is now under threat. Currently no GMO
rice is authorized for commercialization in the Philippines but the
environment group has documented that such experimental rice from the
United States has entered the country’s food chain at least twice in the
past three years. The DA has denied both instances but has refused to
conduct stringent testing on the said US rice. The GMO rice strain in
the US rice was the result of an abandoned experiment, and its
contamination of rice stocks created a major scandal that prompted
countries to reject US rice imports in 2006 and 2007.

At present, an application for GMO rice is pending at the DA, but in
2007, petitioners, supported by Greenpeace and SEARICE filed a court
case questioning the constitutionality of the existing regulatory
process for GMOs, as well as the lack of public participation in the
said approval process. This led, in September 2007, to the granting of
a preliminary writ of injunction on the application of the GMO rice.
The court case is currently on-going.

“The Philippines is a center for rice biodiversity and rice is our most
important food. The clear message then is that the government must
reject GMOs and instead look toward a future of farming and food
production grounded on the principles of sustainability, protection of
biodiversity, and providing all people access to safe and nutritious
food,” said Ocampo.