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Information from Action Aid's coffee campaign (http://www.actionaid.org)
*download Action Aids GM Coffee report here*
You have been warned: GM ripening-controlled coffee has
some serious side effects. Up to 60 million people could be permanently
harmed by drinking it. So what makes GM coffee so destructive?
In nature, coffee beans don't all ripen at the same time, making
any mechanised picking ineffcient. No wonder then that 70% of
all coffee is grown by smallholder farmers in developing countries
around the world. Changing the way coffee is grown would wipe
out the livelihoods of these poor farmers and push millions of
people further into poverty. UK supermarkets and coffee retailers
have the power to stop the development of GM coffee.
They rely on your business and if they know you won't swallow
GM coffee, then they won't stock it. There will thenbe little
point in growing it.
What is GM coffee? A US company called Integrated Coffee Technologies Inc. (ITCI) is developing a technology to control
the ripening process of coffee trees. Coffee cherries normally
ripen at different times and therefore have to be hand picked,
giving absolutely essential jobs to poor people in the developing
world.
ICTI's GM coffee has had its natural ripening process 'switched
off' so that the coffee cherries will only ripen once it is 'switched
on' again when sprayed with the chemical ethylene. It is an example
of genetic technology being used to chemically control a plant's
normal behaviour such as sprouting, flowering and ripening.
The GM coffee crisis. Coffee is grown in 80 countries,
and 70% of the world's coffee is produced by smallholder farmers.
It is often picked by poor people, some of them coffee farmers
themselves trying to make ends meet.Traditional coffee farming
doesn't just produce high quality coffee, it provides millions
of families with the means to stay alive. Already living in poverty,
few have a choice about what they do to earn a living. Coffee
is all they have to hang on to, to keep them from going under.
But there is a dangerous new GM (genetically modified) coffee
in development, designed to increase the profits of huge industrial
plantations. It will do this at the expense of the smallholder
coffee farmers who will be driven out of business and further
into poverty. It will destroy people's lives and probably won't
benefit you. Only big companies will be better off.
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