Venezuela has banned GMO’s
On December 23rd, Venezuela approved a law that would apply one of the world’s toughest regulations on GMO’s (genetically modified organisms). Approved by the country’s National Assembly, the law- which is both anti-GMO and anti-patenting seed- will be overseen by a new coalition, the “Roundtable of Democratic Unity”.
After years of effort, the law was signed by President Nicolas Maduro and seeks to: consolidate national food sovereignty, regulate the production of hybrid seed, rejects the production, distribution and import of GMO seeds, and will ban transgenic seed research. This law will establish the “National Seed System” and this new group will monitor ag violations but will specifically focus on protecting traditional seeds, according to TeleSur.
Here, EcoWatch provides us with Articles 1 and 2 of the new law:
Article 1- The present Law has as its objective to preserve, protect, and guarantee the production, propagation, conservation, and free circulation and use of seed, as well as the promotion, research, distribution, and commercialization of the same, based on a socialist agroecological vision, with the aim of consolidating our food security and sovereignty, prohibiting the release, the use, the propagation, and the entrance into the country and the national production of transgenic seeds as well as the patents and right of the breeder over the seed, in a manner that is sovereign, democratic, participatory, co-responsible and in solidarity, making special emphasis on the valorization of the Indigenous, afro-descendent, peasant and local seed, that benefits biodiversity and helps to preserve life on the planet in conformity with what is established in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Article 2-
1. Promote the transition from conventional systems of production based on monoculture and the use of agrochemicals with agro-industrial and/or corporate seed for conventional use, to an agroecological system and the preservation of the environment in the short, medium and long term, based on agro-biodiversity.
2. Promote the production of seeds that are necessary to guarantee national production, with the goal of avoiding importation and achieving national sovereignty.
3. Promote the transition to communal and eco-socialist agriculture, in order to protect agro-biodiversity by means of the production of local, peasant, Indigenous and Afro-descendant seed.
4. Revalorize and re-legitimize the local, traditional and ancestral knowledge wisdom, beliefs and practices of the peasant, Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other communities.
5. Prohibit the privatization of seed.
6. Orient the organization and planning of public policy in function of the different scales of production, distinguishing the policies intended for family agriculture or polyculture in small-scale production from the policies intended for big producers.
President Maduro, and many others, believe that we owe the earth better treatment and that our families have the right to grow up eating good, healthy food. We would wholeheartedly agree.
While an opposition party is seeking to overturn what’s been done we are celebrating with them now and hope for a day when our Congress seeks to protect what’s left of our country’s plant biodiversity.
Source: EcoWatch , Venezuela Analysis and TeleSur
