We the undersigned, are appalled at the use made of the poverty of the rural people of the South to justify genetically modified food to Northern consumers. We are appalled for the following reasons:

1. Poverty in the South is structurally rooted in the prevalent North-South relationships. The present systems of international resource control, commodity pricing, education, training, research, finance, banking, insurance, transportation etc. are all components of the system that controls wealth and poverty, and which started being put in place during the slavery and colonial periods and have matured in this post-colonial period. Southern poverty, especially rural poverty, is a consequence of this.

2. As such, the solution to rural poverty lies in a multidimensional corrective measure that would enable sufficient local control of the appropriation of the benefits that arise from the use of and trade in resources, as well as the application of labour.

3. The assumption that the complex rural poverty that afflicts the South, would be amenable to solution through single technological inputs is grossly incorrect and totally objectionable since it would misdirect efforts.

4. Though technological inputs have a role to play in rural development, and genetic engineering could be a technology to consider, it would remain but one technology among many. For example even if potential yields of food crops were to be dramatically improved, if storage, transportation, marketing, distribution, and the ability to buy the food were not simultaneously improved, the effort would still remain ineffective. In fact, as we keep pointing out, it is not shortage of food that is the problem, but it's distribution. More GE food is not the point: it is improving access and local food security. But corporations do not profit from such solutions.

5. There are high yielding varieties in rural areas but their impacts remain limited by the bottlenecks imposed by many of the other variables. The agricultural research stations that are found in Southern countries have also produced many such varieties and the potentials of these varieties remain unrealised because of the other negative factors. But research must continue so that there will always be higher yielding varieties to have their potential impacts realised as and when conditions allow it. It is a gross oversimplification to state that such seed would solve rural food problems. The picture is the same with seed of improved nutritional quality such as vitamin A rice.

6. At the heart of the inequity that maintains the present poverty of the South is the inherited positive advantage that the Northern transnational corporations enjoy. We consider the use of the South's rural poverty to justify the monopoly control and global use of genetically modified food production by the North's transnational corporations, not only an obstructive lie, but a way of derailing the solutions to our Southern rural poverty. It is the height of cynical abuse of the corporations' position of advantage. Channel Four Television and The Times newspaper should be ashamed for allowing themsleves to be so manipulated into trying effectively to emotionally blackmail the UK public into using GE.

Yours sincerely,