Big Gene Gathering +20
Celebrate 20 Years of Defeating Corporate GM Food!
December 2, 2017 9.30am – 6pm
LARC, 62 Fieldgate St, London E1 1ES. FREE/donation
Are you eating GM food? The fact that you are mostly* not is down to 20 years of inspiring direct action and pressure by anti-GM activists. In 1997, sparked by the threatened invasion of Monsanto’s GM soya, the anti-GM food campaign erupted into the fields and streets of Britain. Five years of frenetic campaigning persuaded the British public that GM crops were an unacceptable threat to nature, farming and health. The supermarkets were forced to ban GM ingredients and repeated ‘decontamination’ of trial sites blocked GM crop development. By 2003 trials had stopped and there was a Europe-wide de-facto moratorium on growing new GM crops. The myth that ‘you can’t stop technology’ was dead.
The Big Gene Gathering +20 is a chance to learn lessons about how to win on food and environment issues, and how to keep going for the long haul after the initial success and excitement fade. Despite our victories, scientists and corporations are threatening a comeback with much more powerful new technologies that they claim are not GM and so don’t need regulating. Brexit may force GM crops and imported GM foods on us, while the new ‘synthetic biology’ aims at completely rewriting nature and even creating GM babies. So come and meet some of the hero(in)es of the anti-GM food campaign and discuss ways forward to combat the new threats to nature and people.
Speakers from: GM Freeze, Genetic Engineering Network, Beyond GM, GM Watch, Breaking the Frame, Human Genetics Alert and others.
There will be a 20th Birthday party on the evening of Saturday Dec 2nd. Dec 3rd will be devoted to planning new and existing campaigns.
For more information, contact info@breakingtheframe.org.uk, or visit http://breakingtheframe.org.
The event is free, but places are limited so please book in advance at Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/
*Products from animals fed on GM crops are still not banned or labelled.
2 comments:
Actually, it was Labour MP Michael Meacher who convinced the Blair Government not to go ahead with GM foods. He wrote the following article:
http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/2003/10/gm-why-i-think-it-matters/
"Michael Meacher was a remarkable environment minister because for six years, at the start of the Blair government, he almost single-handedly fought to defend the natural world from road-building, the first generation of GM crops and rampant industrialisation.
While junior environment ministers usually accept the Treasury or No 10 line without question, “the Meach”, as he was widely known, stood up to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and possibly saved the administration from political embarrassment by urging caution at key moments."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/21/michael-meacher-an-environment-minister-who-stood-up-for-his-beliefs
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