Celebrate 20 Years of Defeating Corporate GM Food!

Big Gene Gathering +20

Celebrate 20 Years of Defeating Corporate GM Food!

December 2, 2017 9.30am – 6pm

LARC, 62 Fieldgate St, London E1 1ES. FREE/donation

Are you eating GM food? The fact that you are mostly* not is down to 20 years of inspiring direct action and pressure by anti-GM activists. In 1997, sparked by the threatened invasion of Monsanto’s GM soya, the anti-GM food campaign erupted into the fields and streets of Britain. Five years of frenetic campaigning persuaded the British public that GM crops were an unacceptable threat to nature, farming and health. The supermarkets were forced to ban GM ingredients and repeated ‘decontamination’ of trial sites blocked GM crop development. By 2003 trials had stopped and there was a Europe-wide de-facto moratorium on growing new GM crops.  The myth that ‘you can’t stop technology’ was dead.

The Big Gene Gathering +20 is a chance to learn lessons about how to win on food and environment issues, and how to keep going for the long haul after the initial success and excitement fade.  Despite our victories, scientists and corporations are threatening a comeback with much more powerful new technologies that they claim are not GM and so don’t need regulating. Brexit may force GM crops and imported GM foods on us, while the new ‘synthetic biology’ aims at completely rewriting nature and even creating GM babies. So come and meet some of the hero(in)es of the anti-GM food campaign and discuss ways forward to combat the new threats to nature and people.

Speakers from: GM Freeze, Genetic Engineering Network, Beyond GM, GM Watch, Breaking the Frame, Human Genetics Alert and others.

There will be a 20^th Birthday party on the evening of Saturday Dec 2nd.  Dec 3rd will be devoted to planning new and existing campaigns.

For more information, contact info@breakingtheframe.org.uk, or visit http://breakingtheframe.org.uk/calendarofevents/big-gene-gathering-20-london-2nd-december-2017

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The event is free, but places are limited so please book in advance at Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/big-gene-gathering-20-tickets-39334569757). Please help us publicise the event by sharing this on social media and within your networks.

*Products from animals fed on GM crops are still not banned or labelled.