One Minute Activist
October, 2001

International Coffee Technologies, Inc is working to develop GM ripening-controlled coffee.

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Text of October's One Minute Activist Letter:

Dr John Stiles
International Coffee Technologies, Inc
PO Box 1070
Waialua, HI
96791-1070
USA

Dear Dr Stiles,

I buy coffee. I urge you to stop developing GM ripening-controlled coffee.

Sixty million people, including seven million smallholder farmers and their families, rely on the coffee crop for all or part of their livelihood. If your coffee is developed, many will be forced out of business. Their very survival is threatened by what you are doing.

Please also surrender all claims to patents on coffee and cease applying for them in the future. Please think about the effects your work will have on poor coffee farmers and their families.

Coffee is grown in 80 countries, and smallholder farmers produce 70% of the world’s coffee. It is often picked by poor people, some of them coffee farmers themselves trying to make ends meet. Traditional coffee farming doesn't just produce high quality coffee; it provides millions of families with the means to stay alive. Already living in poverty, few have a choice about what they do to earn a living. Coffee is all they have to hang on to, to keep them from going under.

This dangerous new GM (genetically modified) coffee in development is only designed to increase the profits of huge industrial plantations at the expense of the smallholder coffee farmers who will be driven out of business and further into poverty. It will destroy people's lives and probably won't benefit us. Only big companies will be better off.

We don’t need to genetically modify plants that already serve us well, or increase the use of chemicals into our ecosystem. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, we won’t buy it.

Sincerely yours,

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