28 July 2010 | News | Food Sovereignty
Derailed
Cargill and Bayer: agribusiness transnational corporations face problems in Brazil
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A Brazilian court banned Liberty Link, a variety of GM maize owned by German company Bayer and resistant to glufosinate ammonium, for failing to submit a monitoring plan after the introduction of the product in May.
Bayer will have to pay over 25,000 dollars a day if it fails to immediately stop the cultivation, commercialization, transport and import of its GM maize.
Bayer´s variety, Liberty Link, had been authorized by the National Commission on Biosafety as long as post-harvest monitoring and coexistence studies were conducted. The company didn´t comply with this.
Brazilian organizations Terra de Dereitos, the Brazilian Institute in Defense of Consumers, the National Association of Small Farmers and the AS-PTA had called for the suspension of Liberty Link maize.
Since 2007, these organizations have been carrying out public actions demanding the National Commission on Biosafety to conduct the necessary risk analysis on the proposed GM varieties. The work of his commission has been questioned over the past years. The Brazilian organizations are also demanding the commission to provide all information available to the citizens.
Meanwhile, another agribusiness company, US Cargill, is also being questioned in Brazil. Para State’s Attorney General was not satisfied with an environmental impact assessment submitted by the company on July 14th in a public hearing carried out in Santarem, with a strong presence of the population and security forces.
“A police investigation will be carried out to determine if the information provided by Cargill about the environmental impacts of its grain port are true”, said the Attorney General according to the website of the Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil.
On July 14, the Pastoral Land Commission filed a document before the General Attorney’s Office, showing the impacts caused by Cargill´s grain port in Santarem.
This port has been operating for seven years without the necessary environmental impact assessment and public hearings, according to Adital news agency. Several Brazilian organizations state that the building of the port was carried out without taking into account national regulations and that it resulted in the displacement of hundreds of families who worked as small farmers until the arrival of soy.
