[asia-apec 1411] Vandana Shiva in anti-IRRI forum in April

KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines)
 
News release
15 March 2000

INT'L FORUM vs IRRI SAYS DEATH BEGINS AT 40

LOS BAÑOS, LAGUNA -- WORLD renowned scientist-activist Dr. 
Vandana Shiva will make sure the crimes commited by multilateral 
research institutes against the world's poorest farmers will be 
highlighted in the 40th anniversary of the International Rice 
Research Institute (IRRI), which is based in this Philippine 
university town (about 50 kilometers southeast of Manila)

Shiva and other activists from Bangladesh, India, 
Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Canada will join the People's 
Forum on 40 Years of IRRI organized by Masipag Farmer-Scientist 
Partnership and the KMP (Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas) on 3 
April, a day before the IRRI throws a party for Manila government 
VIPs with dubious claims about raising rice productivity for the 
world's hungry and poor.

IRRI's theme 'Rice Research for the New Millennium' will be graced 
by among others Philippine Department of Agriculture Secretary 
Edgardo Angara, one of IRRI's Board of Trustees and pet peeve of 
the local anti-biotechnology movement. 

>From the University of the Philippines campus here, Shiva is 
expected to keep stoking a global crusade based in India against 
corporate biotechnology, gene piracy and genetically modified 
organisms (GMOs), which are new but also becoming raging 
controversial issues in the Philippines. 

In a recent attack against IRRI, she exposed as a hoax the 
genetically engineered Vitamin A rice, a new variety the agency 
proclaimed as a miracle cure for blindness, which according to the 
UN affects 2 million children. 

The IRRI has been writing glowing press stories about the rice 
variety, but former employees are afraid the agency is already 
moving out seedlings and its equally controversial cousin Bt-rice 
into open fields secretly, to dodge press attention and an 
increasingly hostile consumer reaction to GMOs.

"More than $100 from the Rockefeller Foundation have been spent 
over 10 years to fuse genes of rice with those of a bacterium and 
daffodil to create a yellow rice with high levels of beta-carotene, 
which could prove to be another health hazard." Shiva wrote for the 
non-government organization Research Foundation for Science, 
Technology and Ecology.

She said especially children tend to accumulate the oil-soluble 
vitamin in the liver and can cause the reverse of deficiency, which 
is hypervitaminosis A, since rice is a staple eaten in large 
quantities in Asian societies

"Excessive intake of vitamin A especially among those who do not 
lack the nutrient causes even more health problems manifested by 
abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, oedema and bulging 
fontanelle. If this goes on, can lead to chronic toxicity that is felt as 
bone and joint pain, hair loss, dryness and fissures of lips, 
hypertension, pruritis, weight loss and hepatosplenomegaly (liver 
and spleen swelling)," Shiva warned.

IRRI director Pinstrup Anderson has said that Vitamin A rice is 
necessary for the poor in Asia, because "we cannot reach very 
many of the malnourished in the world with pills." 


"In the first place, it was the reductionist IRRI technology that 
promoted widespread use of weed killers and pesticides and wiped 
out cheap alternative sources for vitamins that Indian mothers used 
to turn to, like our own leafy green vegetable called bathua from 
North India and the frogs, fish, snails and edible insects," Shiva 
retorted. 

Anderson has suggested that the "vitamin A rice could provide a 
public relations boost for biotechnology, which has been criticised 
by environmentalists and consumer activists for promoting 'Franken 
foods.' "

Common market items such as liver, eggs, chicken, meat, milk 
and butter are rich in vitamin A, while its precursor beta-carotene is 
provided by dark green leafy vegetables, spinach, carrot, pumpkin, 
mango and malunggay, thus there is no obvious need for vitamin A 
enriched rice.

Manny Yap of the Los Baños-based Masipag said that only 
genuine land reform and patriotic  food programs for each nation 
will provide billions of peasants worldwide with inceased incomes to 
be able to afford these traditional foods and remain reasonably 
healthy..

"If allowed to destroy the remaining farmland it missed during its 
40 years, IRRI's technology will eventually destroy all our traditional 
nutrient sources and further plunge billions of peasants into harsher 
poverty and landlessnes," said KMP chair Rafael Mariano who 
echo Shiva's positions. 

The People's Forum will also feature horror stories about 
experiences with the IRRI- backed Green Revolution presented by 
peasants from the Asian region. # # #
 
Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP)
Peasant Movement of the Philippines
URL: http://www.geocities.com/kmp_ph

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