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FIE NEWS
ARE THE GM POTATO TRIALS TOXIC AND OTHER SUMMER STORIES
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TOXIC GMO BLIGHT FREE POTATOES?
The protest against the granting of a license by the EPA to Teagasc, the farming advisory agency, for a 'deliberate release' of a GM modified potato was widespread and intense. The license permits modification of the established table potato 'Desiree' with a blight resistant gene from a South American potato. It will take place at the Teagasc farm in Carlow and is for four years cultivation with subsequent monitoring of the plots for a further four years. A previous deliberate release in Ireland was of a GM sugar beet, and the trial was abandoned after he Gaelic Earth Liberation Front destroyed the site in 1997.
The protests ranged from Greenpeace's 'There is already enough food in the world to provide every person with 3000 calories a day' through GM Free Ireland and the Organic Farming Association to 'Spuds' [Sustainable Potatoes United Research Project] claim in a letter to the Irish Times that they had 300 members trialling various 'naturally' blight resistant potatoes already.
Dr. Paul Dowding, retired plant pathologist from Trinity College Dublin, however, reminded readers of the Irish Examiner that Arpad Pusztai, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was sacked in 1998 from Scotland's Rowett Institute, which specialised in food safety research after a triple peer reviewed study that involved testing a potato that had been engineered to include a lectin from snowdrop. [Unlike the potato trial which is cisgenic, these modification were transgenic - between different species.] "It was a three-way comparison involving feeding different groups of rats with balanced diets containing plain potato, or GM potato, or plain potato plus pure lectin for 110 days."
"He looked carefully at outcomes: Blood tests, immune function, he measured organ weights, and examined the cell structure of the gut. He found that rats fed on diets with potato plus pure lectin were as healthy as those fed on diets with plain potato."
However, says Dowding in Dr. Oliver Moore's report in the Irish Examiner, "some of the rats fed the engineered potato showed depressed immune function, altered white cell counts, damaged thymus and spleen, smaller brains, livers and testes, as well as changes in cells lining the gut. So there were things in the GM potato that were not lectin, and that had a deleterious effect on the rats' health. That leads one to the inescapable conclusion that inserting one gene has more complex effects than just changing that one parameter." Teagasc has no plans to carry out toxity tests on the GM potatoes and Dowling says that assumptions on food safety are being made "without looking thoroughly for adverse effects, which is highly disturbing".
The debate highlights the Government's closure in 2010 of Ireland's Council for Bioethics, making it the only member of the 27 EU states without such a body. As its Chairman quoted in their concluding report, "It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it."
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FOOD HARVEST CHALLENGE TO HOGAN
The Irish Wildlife Trust (IWT) and Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) have sent a formal request to the Minister for the Environment asking whether the ambitious Food Harvest 2020 requires a formal assessment of its potential impacts on areas protected for nature conservation. The Department guidance 'Appropriate Assessment of Plans and Projects in Ireland Guidance for Planning Authorities' states that 'contact should be made with the Department for advice in cases of doubt as to whether a proposal constitutes a plan or project under the Habitats Directive.'
The move follows on from last month's unanswered letter to Simon Coveney signed by 14 environmental NGOs seeking to have Food Harvest 2020's ambitious targets of up to 50% stocking rate increases - 300% for fish farms) assessed under the Strategic Environmental Assessment and Habitats Directives.
A spokesman for FIE explained that the group had found that in Brussels the Agriculture Commissioner had no formal responsibility to bring member states proposed national expansion plans like Food Harvest 2020 to the notice of the Commissioner for the Environment for advice. 'It was like waving through a sound proof window', one commission official in the Environment Directorate told FIE. 'No one was listening'.
NGOs formal complaints have now triggered an investigation by the Environmental Directorate. The groups are now trying to ensure that in Ireland the Department of the Environmental is brought into the loop to ensure that the massive agricultural explosion will be properly assessed for its impact.
The Minister for the Environment has passed the request to the Minister for the Arts, Heritage, and the Gaeltact, who is in charge of designated sites. He is 'having enquiries made.'
READ THE PRESS RELEASE READ THE LETTER FIE Q&A IN THE IRISH EXAMINER.
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FRACKING: GLOBAL OPPOSITION
Fracking, the process that forces oil out of 'tight rock' by injecting chemicals (specifically protected by copyright), has become the fastest growing form of fossil fuel resource globally. Its advocates suggest that peak oil is now so far in the future as to be discounted and chime in with the 'reasonable' environmentalists and the climate change sceptics. Aside from the potential damage from climate change impacts of any fossil fuel, the impact on local communities and their environment is devastating. The business plans for investment that might go into renewable energies are being undermined and the imperatives for subsides to kick start sustainable energy muffled.
In Ireland, there are many good local groups campaigning and raising funds, organising meetings and publications in the areas most effected. National, the Environmental Pillar of the Social Partnership has now issued a position paper opposing fracking and calling for the withdrawal of the trial licenses issued last year. The independent comprehensive 'Fracking Newsletter' gives up to date information on meetings and activities through the tireless work of Ineke Scholte.
In the UK opposition to fracking was heightened when earthquakes were traced back to trial drilling. In the areas of Wisconsin and along the East Coast, fracking has been hotly contested and widely studied by the EPA as it has in Europe. Now, groups world wide are coming together for an international anti-fracking day on 17 September, 2012. Get involved, even if you only signal support - and don't forget to sign the Irish petition. Fracking has no place in a sustainable Ireland. |
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CONTAMINATED WATERS
FIE'S work last year on Ireland's contaminated drinking water has been ominously reinforced by new figures that show a 200% increase in e.coli VEC infections, already the highest in the EU. Fears over a possible E.coli outbreak forced Clare County Council to ban swimming at three of the county's most popular beaches at Lahinch, Kilkee and Spanish Point last month. Local Kilfinora resident and civil engineer, Michael Duffy, has gone to the High Court over the contamination of the Kilfinora Water Scheme by the local sewage 'treatment' facilities.
The Council's Senior Engineer's response to Duffy's claim in his affidavit that raw sewage was being piped directly into the sea was to depose that 'There was no practicable alternative otherwise available to the First Names Respondent [Clare County Council] for the purposes of remedying the situation and it was a question of either permitting the material to flow untreated to the harbor along the main street of the village or alternatively through a closed pipe and the latter course was adopted as the lesser of two evils.' The case is listed for hearing in December.
Meanwhile, the Government's 'Stimulus' package did not include waste water or drinking water treatment plants. While successive Governments have provided funds for this sector, the recently released EPA 2012 Environmental Report states that 46% of the Waste Water Treatment plants in operation still fail to meet the Government Guidelines - and that does not include the many smaller plants around the country that require 'certificates' rather that licenses.
As with new water treatment plant and their upgrades, many of these projects are 'shovel ready' and would provide local employment to local companies as well as helping us meet the Water Framework Directive targets for 2014.
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'Pretty Litter'
 The Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, Irish Seal Sanctuary and BirdWatch Ireland joined the Irish Wildlife Trust to try and highlight the dangers imposed on wildlife by the use of balloons and sky candles. In fact balloons in seawater deteriorate much slower than those exposed in air, and even after 12 months still retain their elasticity with potential consequences to marine life.
Since a Canadian marine conference first brought this and related wildlife risks to notice in 1989, the mass release of balloons at public and corporate events has been increasingly controversial. San Francisco is one of many US coastal authorities to have banned the practice, and Britain's Marine Conservation Society is running a 'Don't Let Go' campaign.
At the time of a mass balloon release by Mary McAleese in 2005, Green Party TD Trevor Sargent supported FIE's attempts to have the practice ended here in Ireland and sought to have the then environmental Minister, Dick Roche, ban these releases. While the Minister agreed in a written parliamentary reply that 'there have been reports of marine animals found with balloons in their stomachs', he went on to say that he understood that 'balloons form an extremely small percentage of potentially hazardous marine debris' and so it was 'not proposed at present to introduce legislation prohibiting the mass release of balloons.'
In fact 5% - 10% become 'marine debris', a lethal hazard for sea turtles, dolphins, whales, fish, and seabirds who mistake them for squid or other natural prey.
The subsequent Green Minister for the Environment, however, also refused to support FIE's request, and the current beleaguered Minister is also unlikely to be favourably inclined to have the 'nanny state' spoil the parties. FIE is writing to Michael D Higgins seeking an undertaking that he will not attend any gatherings where balloons are deliberately released into the environment.
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Peat Cutting Update
FIE is returning to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament to catalogue the continuing destruction of the our protected bogs by defiant turf cutters, led by populist 'I am what I am' Ming Flannagan, TD. The Government balked at confrontations after the night of June 20, 2012 on the Clonmoylan Bog in County Galway where NPWS officials were abandoned by the Guards, trapped in their cars and harassed all night. The Government now plans to proceed by issuing warning letters to turf cutters and by deductions from Area Aid Payments - maximum reputed to be 15% - while the turf cutters plan to challenge the right of the Government to interfere with their 'constitutional rights', using the High Court as a lobbying platform. Meanwhile, FIE's referral to the Planning Appeals Board to determine if the large scale industrial cutting on sites over 50 hectares requires a license/EIA/planning permission was rejected by the Board in 2010, a rejection overturned by the High Court, who awarded costs against Westmeath County Council and Planning Appeals Board. The resubmission has now been delayed by the Board for nearly two years 'due to the complexities of the case'. The EPA claims it is unable to require an EIA as that is a function of the Planning Authorities. The EPA has been 3 years looking at the requirement for an IPCC licence - while the extraction continues - and apparently has intensified this tear - in the Westmeath sites in question. Read the FIE |
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