EuropaWorld 20/7/2001 New Action Aid Campaign Targets GM Coffee

The British Charity Action Aid has launched a new campaign directed at Genetically Modified (GM) coffee. The price of raw coffee beans has fallen substantially on the world market in recent years, depressing the livelihoods of many farmers and smallholders in developing countries, who grow the crop to earn extra income. GM coffee would allow mechanisation of the coffee harvest putting many of these poor farmers out of business.

According to Action Aid coffee is grown in 80 countries around the world with 70 per cent being produced by smallholder farmers. The beans are often picked by hand, generating an income for millions of poor people. They have to be hand-picked because traditional coffee beans do not all ripen at the same time.

This is where the new GM variety comes in. Now under development it would produce a plant whose beans all ripened at the same time. This means that they could then be harvested by machine and the cost of production would fall dramatically. Small growers would be unable to compete with large coffee plantations and up to 60 million people could be pushed further into poverty say Action Aid.

Action Aid's new campaign is entitled 'Wake Up and Smell the GM Coffee.' They are asking people to write to Integrated Coffee Technologies Inc., the developers of the new GM coffee, to urge them to surrender all their claims to patents on coffee. See www.actionaid.org

Meanwhile, earlier this month in Geneva, the UN backed Codex Alimentarius Commission agreed in principle that the safety of food derived from genetically modified organisms (GMO) should be tested and approved by governments prior to entering the market. In particular, GMO foods should be tested for their potential to cause allergic reactions. "This is the first global step toward the safety assessment of genetically modified foods," said the Director-General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland.