Please sign Friends of the Earth’s petition to Fiona Nash Assistant Minister for Health against ‘new’ GMO techniques. Include your street address and ask for a written reply.
Big agrochemical chemical companies are trying to sneak crops derived from a range of new genetic modification (GM) techniques into our food chain without safety testing or labelling. And our regulators – Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) and the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) – seem only too happy to help them!
New GM techniques such as oligo-directed mutagenesis, zinc finger nucleases and CRISPR pose the same risks as older GM techniques and need to be assessed for safety before they are allowed in our food. They should also be labelled to protect choice for farmers, food producers and consumers.
Most Australians don’t want to eat GM food and it’s high time our regulators stopped letting industry write the rules for them.