Germany’s state-owned news service: ‘US Government in GM industry’s pocket’

The following is an edited excerpt.

US diplomats lobbied aggressively to support its genetically-modified food industries, a campaign group has revealed in a new report. The US even pushed EU countries to change laws to allow GM crops in.

The diplomatic cables were published two years ago by Wikileaks, and most of them weren’t even marked secret. But now US campaigners Food and Water Watch have collated and analyzed 926 State Department cables (covering 113 countries and five years, from 2005 to 2009) to reveal the extraordinary extent to which the US has been lobbying in support of its biotech industry across the world. Their conclusions were published on Tuesday.

As well as lobbying in the developing world – persuading Kenya to commercialize GM crops and helping the Ghanaian and Nigerian governments to push through lax GM legislation – the US PR campaign was also aimed at legislators in the European Union, where a de facto moratorium has limited the production, import, and sale of most GM crops until now.

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