As per article from GeneEthics:
Most Australians, including farmers, support GEfree
policies to protect public health, the environment
and our markets. Surveys show majority
support for bans on genetically engineered (GE)
crops, and full labelling of all foods made using GE
processes and products.More to be found here:
http://www.geneethics.org/Portals/3/Tabloid%20final%20mono.pdf

Our foodstuff should be free of manipulation, the ban on GM should stand for all time. Food grown as naturally as possible is the safest food and the contamination risk is too high.
Countries buy our products because they are the grown in the safest possible way.I know I try to avoid food grown out of Australia because I do not know the conditions it is cultivated under.

The fact is that most of the claims in that "article" (actually a funding advertisement for "gene ethics"- note the please support us with your credit card number at the bottom!) are not support by any real data.

There is no data or analysis to support just about any statement in the whole document. Most farmers groups are actually voting to lift the moratorium on GM crops. The Irina Ermakova "study" as well as others that are talked about never seems to have been published despite being performed over 2 years ago! A lot of the other rhetoric is trying to prove that GM is a failed technology despite being taken up by millions (yes, millions) of farmers worldwide (including Australia) who aren't complaining about yields or costs.

Also, discussing "failed" research (research that does not make it to market) is a bit like talking about how the motor industry is a failure because most of their prototypes never get sold. Or that some products get withdrawn when improvements are made indicates a failure? How silly is that?

The whole document is basically a summary of every argument that gets rehashed over and over again when they (Gene Ethics and other anti-GM organisations) want some money and public support, despite having being debunked many times over, often years ago.

For more information on some of the more well known participants and issues take a look at this thread:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6042

Firstly, most farmers in Australia do not support the GE bans. It is only the minority group Network of Concerned Farmers, composed mainly of organic farmers (and interestingly 1 organic retailer), that supports the bans. State Farmers Federations now have policies to overturn the bans, as do the United Dairy Farmers of Victoria. Only today, the WAFF charged the Western Australian Government to fast track commercial sized trails of GM crops. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/17/1980441.htm

I did like Bob Phelp’s idea of GM crops stalling. This has been a concept he has pushed every year for more than a decade. But to claim they are stalled now, he needs to use the excuse that there are no more crop species since 1996. “Not one new commercial crop or trait has been released since 1996.” Even in this he is wrong as GM alfalfa, GM squash and GM papaya have all been released since then, and GM papaya and GM squash are virus tolerant. What Bob ignores in his stalling is that more than 10 million farmers across 5 continents grew 100 million hectares of GM crops last year.

Of course you are welcome to believe what you want about GM crops and can avoid them if you wish because products are labelled, but you don’t have the right to tell farmers what they can and cannot do based on a pack of untruths. Nor does Bob Phelps.

If farmers want to grow them, they should be able to. As for the food trade not wanting to use GM ingredients, then why did the crushers import GM canola from Canada last year? And guess what, nobody really cared.

if you stop long enough to think: who will decide?

(not me. some pollie.)

how will he decide?

(some one will give him a persuasive sum of money.)

presto, opinion comes out:

"why should i ,and you, waste time on this?"

The reasoning behind GM foods is simple greed and nothing else.

The corporation pushing this stuff onto farmers and consumers and insisting that it is 100% safe, is the same company who brought us the miracle of DDT not so long ago.