US: Anti-globalisation and environmental protesters are planning to converge on the Californian state capital, Sacramento, this weekend to demonstrate against a conference run and funded by the US government on genetically modified food.
Protesters claim that the conference is a "desperate attempt" to save the embattled GM food industry.
The conference theme is the broadening of "knowledge and understanding of agricultural science and technology . . . to raise agricultural productivity, alleviate hunger and famine and improve nutrition".
More than 120 ministers, some senior, from 75 countries including Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Israel, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Uganda and Venezuela are to attend. It is backed by the US state department, the department of agriculture and the agency for international development (USAid).
Some 130 groups are mobilising, mainly to protest against what they see as the conference's hidden agenda.
"The largely US-based bio-technology industry is in crisis," said Peter Rosset, co-director of Food First, the Institute for Food and Development Policy, a thinktank based in Oakland, California.
"This conference is a desperate attempt, at the taxpayers' expense, to prop up a failing industry. The whole conference is pitched at developing countries."
Mr Rosset said that, with suspicion growing about GM food around the world, the US government had decided to bail out the industry. He said every country, with the exception of those deemed to be in the "axis of evil", had been invited.
Fares for two senior ministers from each country were being paid for by the US, he said. Significantly, western European countries were not attending. - (Guardian Service)