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Activists allege Chile maize is 'contaminated'
Posted: Friday, October 31, 2008 3:08 pm
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Chile 's regulatory position on GM crops is interesting. The country only allows GM crops if they are grown for seed, but the seeds must be exported. On the other hand, importing GM products and ingredients for food and feed is allowed. Activists took 30 samples of conventional Chilean maize growing somewhere near GM maize. An un-named laboratory found that 3 of the 30 samples tested positive for 0.03 percent, and another tested positive for 0.13 percent. The activists are horrified.

"These results are extremely serious," María Isabel Manzur said to Inter Press Services. "The question is, who will take responsibility? Who will pay for this contamination?"

Manzur is an activist with Sustainable Societies Foundation (FSS), which is aligned with the Sustainable Chile Program. Together, the groups submitteed the test results to Agriculture Minister Marigen Hornkohl, and called for "independent studies to determine the extent of the contamination, as well as laws prohibiting growing GM crops in the country, on the grounds that they are harmful to the environment and public health."

"If the source of the contamination is transgenic maize sold worldwide for food, it would not be a major problem", said Romilio Espejo, who heads the biotechnology laboratory of Chile's Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology (INTA). "[B]ut if the source is transgenic maize produced for other purposes, or that has not yet been approved as risk-free for the population, then it is worrying, even though the contamination is at a very low level."

Which means, there's little concern if the GM maize involved is a type Chileans are allowed to import for food or feed, but prohibited from growing for themselves.

That makes sense, in an odd way, if it makes sense at all.
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