Category: Sabotage

A (belated) action report from the Stop Bayer GM campaign.

The Bayer Cropscience building at North Newbalds had all 56 of it’s windows broken. The message “No GM – Not Now, Not Ever” was spraypainted on a wall. The windows were doubleglazed so although only the outer panes were smashed the whole lot will probably have to be replaced. One window had both panes broken and a litre of white gloss paint was thrown through to add to the disruption and expense. Let Bayer be aware – if they become the main GM offender again, we’ll be back.

This was one of 4 actions against Bayer that happened over the last month as a warning to Bayer to stay out of GM crops.
The 4 actions were the closing of a succesful campaign using direct action against Bayer AG – who WERE the major GM players in the UK and are still major the world over. This campaign saw over 50 varied and diverse actions in a few months, part of a 17 year history of direct action against GM crops the world over.
See www.stopbayergm.org for particulars of the other Bayer actions.

There have been reports of more actions to send notice to Bayer, just before their AGM, that if they DO continue to push GM crops in the UK they will be hit again.

Here are the first 2 reports in.

Date: Thursday 22 April 2004

On the night of Thursday 22nd April, Newbury town centre surrounding Bayer Plc’s UK headquarters was flyposted and stickered with ‘Don’t Buy Bayer’ stickers to let them know that although the campaign is ending, they are being watched and any further attempts to grow GM in the UK will be met with direct action.

The poster read as follows:

BAYER OUT OF BIOTECH!

Bayer were pushing for GM Maize to be the first GM crop commercialised in the UK, but thanks to a campaign of direct action and sabotage and years of GM field trials being trashed, they have abandoned their plans to grow the Maize and will not carry out any further tests of GM crops.

AND STAY OUT

This is a victory for direct action and if Bayer try to introduce GM crops in the future they will be met with increased resistance.

NO GM!

Date: 29th April 2004

Bayer’s wholly owned subsidary, HC Starck, was visited on Thursday night for a quick spraypainting. THe message Bayer – STAY out of GM was spraypainted on the front wall as a gentle reminder that if they do intend to ever plant in the UK we will target them once more!

Phone 01223 252514 – direct line of Paul Rylott, head of Bayer Bioscience.
Email ukinfo@bayercropscience.com

Paul Rylott may have been sacked by Bayer but he’s not gone yet! And he is still one of the key players in the attempt to bring GM crops into Britain.
Please take the time to phone in and let them know what you think of their plans to grow GM crops in Britain. It doesnt take very many people doing this to affect their communications and disrupt the working of their offices. (And it only takes 20p!)
If you can’t get through on these then try
01223 252557 or tech@bayercropscience.com

NB – it’s best to use a phonebox and dial 141 before the number….just to keep yourself safer!

Or try me directly on paul.rylott@bayercropscience.com

However, please dont keep hanging up after one ring, and saving your 20 pences, you cheapskates. I really upsets me when people do that repeatedly. Some nasty people keep doing that for hours on end so we end up having to disconnect our phones. So dont do it, cos it’s really not nice.

And if I’m not around contact my colleague Julian
Tel: 01223 252426
Fax: 01223 252427
Email: julian.little@bayercropscience.com
……………………………………………………………………….
THE GM PHONE BLOCKADE – CHANGE OF NUMBER: 01223 252557

Paul Rylott’s landline has been disconnected: reception claims he is no longer employed there.
So keep ringing and emailing, but use the reception phone: 01223 252557
or ukinfo@bayercropscience.com

Locks jammed at Bayer Crop Science in North Yorkshire

On the 30th of January the Bayer Crop Science facility in North Newbalds, North Yorkshire had all its locks jammed with metal and superglue.

This is the 3rd or 4th time this has happened at this building.

The jamming of locks is a quick and simple action which can be carried out very safely at pretty much any Bayer location in the country. It can also have an effect disproportional to the effort put into it – when workers are unable to get to work productivity will surely suffer.

We received an anonomous tip off that on the night of May the First a small group of people visited Hatfield Peat Works at night.

They attempted to bring down the two power lines that provide electricity to the works. One of the support posts for one of the power lines was succsefully brought down, but unfortunetly the other line proved to be indestructable.

However with limited power major disruption was caused to their operation.

Peat Alert
www.peatalert.org.uk

This event was timed to coincide with the start of the peat-cutting season, which can only begin when the peat has dried out enough.

All morning Leeds & Sheffield Friends of the Earth and others collected messages from the people of Thorne and the surrounding area, on cards, placards and balloons. They got a really good response from the local population who are well aware of the damage being done to their moors. At the same time activists from the north were taken on guided tours of the site and learnt as much as they could about the peat-cutting process.

After lunch everyone gathered at a friendly pub and then set off in a procession to the peat works. Some of the (smaller) messages collected during the morning were handed in to a poker-faced security guard and then around 50 people strolled into the processing plant, past him and the four or five bumbling police officers. They had a good look round the vast site and inside lots of buildings, they conga’d through the piles of stacked up compost bags and ceilidhed alongside the railway line.

There were no arrests as we danced out of the site and back to the pub. After a lovely day we decided to have a bigger, better and longer trespass of the site and the moors on Tuesday 25th June, with some camping available the night before – more details available from Leeds EF!

Other actions will of course be going on all the time!

The manager of a McDonald’s restaurant in Milan was injured Saturday when farmers – along with a cow, a pig and two chickens – staged an impromptu protest over genetically-modified food products. The cow slipped on the restaurant floor, accidentally hitting the manager with a hoof, Ansa news agency reported. The unidentified farmers left the scene a few minutes later in a van.

McDonald’s staff later reported the incident to the police, while the manager was taken to see a doctor. It was not immediately clear why the farmers targeted the US fast-food chain but GM food ingredients are widely on sale in North America.

They are banned or shunned in other countries, especially in western Europe, amid fears that the engineered crops could pose as yet unknown health risks. Genetically-modified organisms are crops to which genes have been added in a bid to improve yields or their resistance to pests. The most popular GM crops are corn, cotton, potatoes, soybeans and tomatoes.

ROME, – Agence France Presse 3 March 2001

Militants opposed to research into genetically modified organisms (GMOs) broke into a farm laboratory in northeast Italy Saturday as Group of Eight (G8) environment ministers met in Trieste to find a compromise over a UN treaty on global warming.

Some 50 protesters in white coats broke open the doors to the lab, run by a regional agency for agricultural development at Pozzuolo del Friuli near Udine where studies and experiments on transgenic seeds were said to be carried out. Seed samples, notably of maize, that were taken
by militants would be analyzed by independent laboratories, Ansa news agency cited one of the militants, Beppe Caccia, as saying. Police did not intervene during the 15-minute protest and no further incidents were reported.

Demonstrators held banners reading “Stop GMOs” and “Stop Frankenfood experiments” in Italian. A regional environmental leader, Paolo Ciani, later called the protest a “serious act”. Ciani, who is also deputy president of the northeastern region around Trieste and Udine, said that no transgenic experiments had been carried out at Pozzuolo del Friuli for the last three years, at the specific request of the regional government in Trieste.

But Caccia said that protesters would not be gagged. “The protest this morning is a slap in the face of the monstrous and disproportionate security apparatus set up for the G8 environmental
meeting,” he added. “Biotechnologies are okay if they serve to improve life as in the biomedical sector but they are unacceptable in farming where there is no need to produce more,” he said. “Today’s output is huge; it’s the distribution between rich and poor countries in the world
which is unbalanced.”

As the West tries to bully Third World governments into using GM crops, peasant farmers around the world are denouncing products that would increase economic dependency, destroy the livelihoods of all but a privileged few farmers, and replace locally controlled food production with corporate-controlled monoculture for export.

On 29th November 2000 Filipino farmers held massive demonstrations at Monsanto’s offices in Mindanao at the end of the Continental Caravan 2000 – a series of protests across India and Bangladesh.

They were joined by farmers from Indonesia, Thailand, Japan and Korea. Habibur Rahman, a farmer representing Nayakrishi Andolon (New Agriculture Movement), stated: “the Bangladeshi farmers reject genetically engineered rice and I am pleased to learn about the strong resistance here in the Philippines.”

On 3rd January 2001 Indian farmers relaunched their ‘Cremate Monsanto’ campaign as 300 volunteers of the newly formed ‘Hasiru Sene’ (Green Brigade), part of the Karnataka State Farmers Association, pulled up and burned Monsanto’s trial of GM cotton.

On 26th January over 1200 Brazilian farmers stormed a Monsanto research station and pulled up GM corn and soya trials. The occupation was timed to coincide with the international protests against globalisation at the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“We’re staying here indefinitely,” said Solet Campolete from the Landless Workers Movement, “these seeds trick farmers and create dependency on seeds produced by a big multinational.” They scrawled on the walls, ‘Monsanto is the end of farmers!’ but perhaps they got that the wrong way round!

On Sunday 7th January 2001 part of a farm-scale trial site at Harbury in Herefordshire was destroyed by ‘Two Peasants, a Pixie and a Pair of Marigolds’. The five entered the field shortly before midnight and during four hours pulled up about 200sq metres of oilseed rape.

In a statement, the group explained they had taken action after an earlier demonstration and public meeting had failed to prevent the trial from going ahead. “As local people we formed an affinity group with both collective and well-reasoned personal motivation for our actions.

We feel that the strength of our arguments will vindicate our action and keep the issue in the public domain,” they stated. “We want to remind the government, Aventis and the farmer, who have brushed aside the strong arguments and genuine concerns of the public, bio-scientists and environmentalists, that people aren’t content to see this continue and feel their only avenue to protect the environment is to take direct action themselves.”

“We completely cleared the area of all the oilseed. We were literally on our knees pulling them out at the roots. It was to highlight the issue to the local and national government that we don’t feel the public is being listened to. And because we feel they have acted illegally, we feel we have done nothing wrong,” a protester explained, vowing the campaign would continue as long as the trials and the use of the technology continued.