If you eat food and vote in Europe, you need to read this.

What's happening

On May 18 the EU Parliament votes to scrap GMO labels on a new class of gene edited crops.

This means the tomato in your salad or the rice on your plate could be engineered in a lab and the label won't say. So if something goes wrong years from now (not unlikely — just look at the current state of things), no one will be able to trace where the problem came from.

And if someone plants those seeds and the pollen drifts into an organic farmer’s field, who spent 30 years building their certification, they lose that certification.

It gets worse

Brussels is saying these crops are ‘basically the same’ as natural plants, so no safety checks are needed. But the companies who make them still get to legally own them.

Three companies end up controlling the seeds that grow the vast majority of our food: Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta.

Why is that dangerous?

They sell only what's profitable which means traditional (read: more resilient, more nutritious, tastier) varieties die out.

We end up depending on a handful of patented plants grown everywhere. Which means one disease, one drought and the whole food supply collapses.

The Irish potato famine started exactly this way.

What about the farmers?

For 10,000 years, agriculture has worked on a simple principle: save your best seeds, plant them next year. But if farmers do that with these new seeds, they’ve broken the law.

This forces farmers to buy the seeds from those three companies all over again, every season.

You can take a wild guess at who is and isn’t getting rich from this.

The deadline

After the vote, it's done. There will be no appeals and no reopening. Once those crops are in the food supply without labels, that's where they will stay.

Sign the petition before 18th May:

(it takes a few seconds and automatically sends an email to your parliamentary representatives)