Big Gene Gathering +20 – December 2017 – Morning sessions on anti-GM campaigns 1997-2003 – Videos

See below for embedded videos, or to watch all the talks in order, see the Youtube playlist.

Are you eating GM food?

The fact that you are mostly* not is down to 20 years of inspiring direct action and pressure by anti-GM activists. In 1997, sparked by the threatened invasion of Monsanto’s GM soya, the anti-GM food campaign erupted into the fields and streets of Britain. Five years of frenetic campaigning persuaded the British public that GM crops were an unacceptable threat to nature, farming and health. The supermarkets were forced to ban GM ingredients and repeated ‘decontamination’ of trial sites blocked GM crop development. By 2003 trials had stopped and there was a Europe-wide de-facto moratorium on growing new GM crops.  The myth that ‘you can’t stop technology’ was dead.

The Big Gene Gathering +20 is a chance to learn lessons about how to win on food and environment issues, and how to keep going for the long haul after the initial success and excitement fade.  Despite our victories, scientists and corporations are threatening a comeback with much more powerful new technologies that they claim are not GM and so don’t need regulating. Brexit may force GM crops and imported GM foods on us, while the new ‘synthetic biology’ aims at completely rewriting nature and even creating GM babies. So come and meet some of the hero(in)es of the anti-GM food campaign and discuss ways forward to combat the new threats to nature and people.

Speakers from: GM Freeze, Genetic Engineering Network, Beyond GM, GM Watch, Biofuel Watch, Econexus, Breaking the Frame, Human Genetics Alert and others.

Videos from morning sessions:

Anti-GM campaign 1997-2003

Dave King: Short history of anti-GM campaigning 1997-2003

Jim McNulty: Memories & reflections on the early days of the anti-GM movement

Dave King: Further reflections on the history of anti-GM campaigning 1997-2003 (stepping in for Olaf Bayer).

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