Planet Diversity

A big conference is starting tomorrow May 12 in Bonn, Germany about GMO-free zones, called Planet Diversity. Many delegates from all over the world, including Japan, will participate. Keisuke Amagasa from the No! GMO Campaign, Shimizu Ryoko from the Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Co-operative, and former Hokkaido vice-governor Asada Shinji are among the speakers and volunteers.

There will also be a festival to celebrate diversity: A holiday of sense and the senses – diversity has thousands of faces, tastes, drinks, traditions, songs and treats. They are inviting professional and amateur farmers and gardeners, seed producers and propagators, chefs and food producers to present the diversity of their products, varieties and plants to be seen and smelled, shared and tasted. It will be a great Festival of Diversity, to which they invite the people and families of Bonn, Cologne and surrounding areas as well as all friends from Europe and the world. With theatre, music, animals, plants, seeds, actions, dance and music, videos, presentations of all kinds and thematic pavilions the diversity of life will be celebrated.

This is held while government delegates from some 190 nations gather for the UN Biosafety Protocol negotiations, called COP-MOP4, about "adequate level of protection worldwide in the field of the transfer, handling and use of genetically modified organisms that may have adverse effects on the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, taking also into account risks to human health."

Activists will demonstrate against genetic engineering at the site of these UN negotiations:

* for the human right to adequate, diverse and healthy food – against the misuse of agriculture for agro-fuel, and other raw materials for international speculation;
* for the right of consumers and farmers to decide – against genetic experiments with our food and our environment;
* for the free exchange of seeds and agricultural know-how – against patents on life forms and bio-piracy;
* for the preservation of regional diversity – against agro-industrial monocultures and the worldwide death of farmers;
* for biological diversity – regional, fair and GMO-free!