A controversial resolution that American delegates put forward to support agricultural biotechnology was softened at the recent meeting of the Associated Country Women of the World.
The nine million member organization will instead recommend support of genetically modified food and biotech that has “proven benefits to consumers, the environment and food producers” and acceptance of the biotech process when “its ethical, social, economic and ecological implications have been fully debated and understood by all stakeholders.”
The modified GM resolution will join others that the ACWW sends to the United Nations in its role as an advisory body.
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Colleen Ross of Ontario, who represented the National Farmers Union, told reporters at the March 23-29 meeting in Australia that she was disappointed the watered-down motion was approved.
“I’m very sad ACWW has passed this resolution,” she said. “We should have rejected the amended resolution. We should have taken a strong stand.”
In speaking for the motion, Marilyn Poppen, who chairs the Iowa Farm Bureau Women, said “it is not morally right to stand in the way of progress for all the people of this planet.”
Another contentious resolution was one from the British women’s institutes urging an immediate phasing out of manmade chemicals that persist in the environment or build up in human bodies and disrupt hormonal systems. The motion passed.
The 40 Canadian delegates who attended the ACWW conference elected Mildred Keith of New Brunswick to represent Canada at ACWW business meetings during the next three years. Keith, a former president of Canada’s national WI group, competed with four other women including three western Canadian women for the position.
Other approved farm-related motions supported food self-sufficiency for the Third World, urged awareness of the dangers of industrial-style agriculture that promotes quantity over quality, and pressed governments for sterner laws to punish those who destroy crops and research laboratories or free animals.
In other general motions, the ACWW urged cheaper drugs for AIDS patients and more government action to prevent war and to deal with the exploitation of women and children that follows political turmoil.
ACWW’s next world gathering will be held in Finland in 2007.
