Vancouver & Burnaby Chapter

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Food

After water, the most important thing to humans is food. And yet our food is under threat on many fronts. Under the SPP, food safety rules and regulations are being harmonized with those of the U.S. and Mexico. News reports in the spring of 2007 revealed that Canada’s rules on pesticide use on food crops were being watered down to match weaker U.S. ones. If we allow the SPP to stand, increasingly our food safety rules will be compromised: we are abandoning a regulatory system based on the precautionary principle, and moving to a model of industry self regulation and 'risk assessment'. Clearly, this only serves the interests of big business, including many giant U.S. agri-business companies.

At the same time, the Conservative government is bent on dismantling the Canada Wheat Board, which for decades has protected Canadian agriculture from predatory international grain conglomerates, and provided fair prices to our farmers.

And finally, the Canadian government has worked hand-in-hand with bio-tech companies to promote untested and potentially dangerous genetically engineered foods, including the extremely controversial Terminator seeds. This reckless promotion of a potentially dangerous technology only furthers the growing corporate control of our food sources, and undermines the traditional sustainable seed saving practices of farmers. The Council calls on the federal government to ban Terminator seeds, to strictly regulate genetically engineered crops, and to institute mandatory labelling of all genetically engineered foods, so that consumers can at least make informed choices when they purchase their food.