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Moderated conference on Genomics in Food and Agriculture

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Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:56:27 +0100
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This is from Dr. Paulo Ramos, Environmental analyst from Brazil. I have been working with Agroecology and biodiversity conservation. I am now representing the Brazilian Agroecology Social Organizations as a member of the National Technical Commission for Biosafety (CTNBio). 

I would like to thank everybody for sharing experiences here in this e-mail conference.

Here and there we are listening about biotech-genomic themes as a model that will help developing countries, help to put away the growing poor population's hunger threat, help with deseases like dengue, malaria and so on. But in general what we can see is that these technological improvements are taking other directions. They are at the service of others than developing countries or peasants.

I want to stress here that in Brazil about 80% of food cames from the peasant production which is not related to genomic improvements. Much of beans, fruits and vegetables does not relate to genomic achievements.

If those tools are to help famine, help the environment, help health shouldn't they promote agro-biodiversity instead of monocultures agrotoxic related like we see now. Shouldn't they promote sharing of the social-economic benefits from the wealth generated. Shouldn't they be at the service of the peasant families instead of the Big-Ag commodity companies. Shouldn't they be protecting environment and health.

We can see right now on Brazilian TV-News the amazing traffic jam where trucks get stucked in a kilometric long line to unpack their commodity grains, to fill  boat holds to China, Europe or somewhere else in the world. All this grain production is related to biotech innovations of Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, Bayer, Du Pont and some few others agrobusiness corporations.

We can also see right now in technical magazines the foreseen crop attack of Spodoptera frugiperda and Helicoverpa zea which are putting down the yields of maize, soy and cotton in Brazilian fields.

So, I would like to hear from the participants of this conference something that could show a distinct direction on the use of the technologies we are here to discuss about.

Dr. Paulo Ramos
Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, 
Brasília National Park, 
Brasília, 70.000, 
Brazil
tel. 5561 96559785 
e-mail: paulomr1951 (at) gmail.com

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information on this FAO Biotechnology Forum, see http://www.fao.org/biotech/biotech-forum/ ]
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