A global citizen's declaration for biosafety and food security: resolution of the 7th International Gathering on biodevastation, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, May 16-18, 2003, www.biodev.org.

• Position: Bio-Repression

Seven years after the first commercial introduction of genetically engineered (GE) foods, most people around the world still firmly reject this technology. Only four countries are growing nearly all of the world's genetically engineered crops, and only four basic GE crops (corn, soy, cotton and canola) are being grown commercially on a large scale. More than 35 countries around the world, including the entire European Union, have taken steps to restrict the growing and importation of GE crops, and require labeling of all foods with genetically engineered ingredients.

Promises that genetic engineering will feed the world, reduce chemical use, and benefit farmers have proven entirely false. Countries in the global South that have experimented with GE crops have found their introduction to be a dismal failure, as illustrated last year by the complete failure of Bt cotton crops in several locations in India. Now is a time to thoroughly revisit this technology and fully assess its real consequences for our health, the environment, and social equity around the world.

Instead, the US administration has proceeded to initiate a suit at the level of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to pressure the European Union to lift its five-year moratorium on new GE food varieties and strict limits on imports of GE products. Once again, US-based agribusiness companies, the biotechnology industry, and their political allies in Washington are seeking to force this failed and inherently hazardous technology on the peoples of the world.

The biotechnology industry and its allies would compel us to overlook the hazard of new allergens and spreading antibiotic resistance, of likely immune system and digestive system damage, of contamination of neighboring crops and their wild relatives, of known harm to beneficial organisms in the environment, and of new combinations of genetic traits wreaking unforeseen and largely unexamined ecological disruptions. They want us to forget how they have terrorized farmers with their lawsuits, threats and surveillance, and how farmers in the global South are suffering from dependencies on unaffordable chemical inputs that GE varieties would only increase their dependence upon.

They would have us look aside while they impose patent regimes that reduce everything alive to commercial products that exist only to be bought, sold, and traded in a captive global marketplace.

We declare our support for the right of European countries to...