Leading anti-GM figure to tour Australia

Anti-GM NGO, the Australian GeneEthics Network, is hosting an Australian speaking tour by American Dr Chuck Benbrook, a prominent organic-food advocate and bete noire of genetically modified agriculture.

In a media alert marked "urgent" today, GeneEthics executive director Bob Phelps announced the dates and venues for Benbrook's tour.

The announcement describes Benbrook as "a renowned US agricultural technology expert" and "top policy adviser to the US Government for 20 years. He is a former agricultural adviser to the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations.

Phelps said Benbrook will tour Australia between November 28 and December 9, He will hold a series of public meetings, industry seminars and media conferences in Canberra and all the State capitals, and at major rural centres including Orange (NSW), Horsham (Vic), and Mt Gambier, in the heartlands of Australia's canola industry.

In WA, however, Benbrook will only hold a media conference and industry seminar in Perth, and will not be speak in Esperance, centre of the State's canola industry. Angry farmers from the Esperance region recently voted almost unanimously to press WA Agriculture Minister Kim Chance to lift the state's moratorium on all GM crops, to allow them to grow more profitable and productive GM herbicide-tolerant canola varieties.

Even before arriving in Australia, Benbrook is warning that Australian agriculture risks using its 'clean and green' status in international markets if it ignores food safety, environmental and economic costs of GE crops.

'Clean and green' has become a catchphrase for the anti-GM movement, and for politicians in the five states and the ACT that have moratoria on GM crops, ostensibly to protect their agricultural export markets.

But Professor Rick Roush, the American former director of the Australian Weeds CRC in Adelaide, now at the University of California, Davis, said last year the phrase had no cachet in the US or other markets for Australian produce; consumers in these countries were generally ignorant of the status of GM crops in Australia.

Benbrook authored a major report last year that was highly critical of the economic and environmental impact of Argentina's booming GM soy industry.

On today's press release, he said soybean and cotton farmers across the south-eastern US have relied almost exclusively on GM varieties for several years, and the system is "on the brink of collapse", with farmers profit margins shrinking as they used record volumes of herbicides.

But US and Australian agricultural experts and scientists have pointed out that none of Benbrook's supposedly authoritative reports has been peer-reviewed, or published in the orthodox scientific literature. They have also questioned the methodology and conclusions of his Argentina soybean industry report, accusing him of bias, highly selective use of statistics, and relying on anecdotal accounts to support his arguments.of statistics, and relying on anecdotal accounts to support his arguments.