DIAL GM FOR MURDER

From SchNEWS 583, Britain's Direct Action Newsletter, Friday 9th November 2007 - Issue 610

A Brazilian anti-GM campaigner has been murdered at a Syngenta GM crop trial in Paraná, Brazil. Via Campesina (The International Peasants Movement) camp at the experimental farm was shot at by security, killing Valmir Mota de Oliveira, [from the] Movimento Sem Terra (the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement – see SchNEWS 505) activist. That morning 150 Via Campesina members had set up camp at Syngenta’s site, and at 1pm a bus full of gunmen arrived and opened fire. Also killed was a security guard with two other protesters seriously injured.

This is the second time Via Campesina occupied this site, after Syngenta had previously illegally trialled GM soybeans and corn last year. At the time this was a victory, with the state governor siging a decree proposing to turn the farm into a centre for agricultural research to help rural peasants. Since then, the decree was overturned due to the pressure of the Rural Society of the West - a reactionary group of pro-agribusiness large-scale landowners, and other agribusiness interests – and Syngenta is pressing ahead with another trial crop. When the MST organised a march to the farm last November, they were blockaded by the tractors of the Royal Society, who fired shots in the air and beat the marchers with sticks, injuring nine.

Now Syngenta have brought in security firm NF Security (has a nice neo-Nazi ring to it!). The activist killed had been one of three MST members who'd received death threats from the president of the Rural Society – the other two managed to escape. The owner of NF Security has admitted that he gave the order to attack, and wasn’t claiming the anti-GM protesters were armed. They have a Blackwater-style relationship as a private security firm to Syngenta and the local large-landowners. NF – which last month had illegal arms confiscated by federal police – is known to hire individuals with violent criminal records to form armed militias to carry out rural land evictions, for customers like the Royal Society.

Syngenta are the world’s largest agrochemical company, and third largest commercial seed producer. They caused the largest ever genetic contamination in the US in between 2001-2004 when its GM Bt-10 corn was mixed with grain meant for human consumption.

They previously held GM crop trials in the UK – mostly herbicide tolerant or insect resistant crops - but, like Bayer and Monsanto, were forced to abandon plans for more crops in Britain in 2004. Since the mid nineties direct action campaigners trashing the trial crops and overwhelming negative publicity has kept them at bay (but the GM threat is back – see SchNEWS 583).

See www.viacampesina.org