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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

THE GMO SCRAPBOOK: RUSSIA CONSIDERING BILL TO MAKE GMOs A TERRORIST THREAT

…yes, you read that correctly. There is a bill being considered before the Russian state Duma to consider those who introduce GMOs into a region to be “terrorists”:
GMO producers should be punished as terrorists, Russian MPs say
What’s interesting here is that the headline of the article is not targeting the grower or farmer of GMOs, but rather, the producer, i.e., the large agribusiness giants themselves. The key paragraphs in this article are here:
“The draft legislation submitted on Wednesday amends Russia’s law regulating GMOs and some other laws and provides for disciplinary action against individuals and firms, which produce or distribute harmful biotech products and government officials who fail to properly control them.
“At worst, a criminal case may be launched against a company involved in introducing unsafe GMOs into Russia. Sponsors of the bill say that the punishment for such deeds should be comparable to the punishment allotted to terrorists, if the perpetrators act knowingly and hurt many people.
“’When a terrorist act is committed, only several people are usually hurt. But GMOs may hurt dozens and hundreds. The consequences are much worse. And punishment should be proportionate to the crime,’ co-author Kirill Cherkasov, member of the State Duma Agriculture Committee told RT.
“Russian criminal code allows for a punishment starting with 15 years in jail and up to a life sentence for terrorism.” (Emphasis in the original)
While I can to a certain degree sympathize with the idea that criminals – whether the criminally negligent or criminally intentioned regarding this issue – should be treated as such, I suspect that there may be another agenda in play here, and it may be a subtle one. 
 
Whatever the intent of the Russian law or those behind it (are they just old Communists grasping at whatever issue they can as a means of clawing their way back to power?), I suspect that what we may really have here, whether or not the bill ever becomes the law in Russia, is a subtle move towards precisely what I have been predicting, namely, that the BRICSA nations will turn GMOs into an international geopolitical issue, both by questioning the obviously flawed corporate “science” behind them, but also by placing themselves as the champions of the non-GMO farmer in the teeth of the questionable Mafia-mercantilist policies of the West’s agribusiness giants. And eventually, they may seek to become a new market for international “heirloom seeds.” 
 
And to do this, you need a law or a policy on the books. 
 
Thus far, it has been Russia that in the BRICSA entente has been driving most of the discussion about GMOs within that bloc of nations. If this strategy or prediction therefore is to have any merit, one will expect to see similar policies or measures being entertained in the other BRICSA nations, particularly Brazil, India, South Africa, with their own rich agricultural economies. But there is also another safe prediction here: Russia, regardless of what the other BRICSA nations may do, may be serving more notice that it is willing to buck the mercantilist policies of American on this issue as well. If so, there will be a rising market for Russian agricultural products.

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