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 Subject: Brazilian Protesters Destroy GM Crops: Group

 _*Brazilian Protesters Destroy GM Crops: Group*_

 By Staff Writers
 Sao Paulo (AFP) March 7, 2008

 Around 300 women rural residents in Brazil burst into a property owned
 by the US company Monsanto and destroyed a plant nursery and crops
 containing genetically modified corn, their organization said.

 The women were protesting what they saw as environmental damage by the
 crops.

 They trashed the plants within 30 minutes and left before police arrived
 at the site in the southern state of Sao Paulo, a member of the Landless
 Workers' Movement, Igor Foride, told AFP.

 The Brazilian government had "caved in to pressure from agrobusinesses"
 by recently allowing tinkered crops to be grown in the country, he said.

 In Brasilia, a protest by another 400 women from an umbrella group, Via
 Campesina (the Rural Way), was held in front of the Swiss embassy
 against Syngenta, a Swiss company that is selling genetically modified
 seeds in Brazil.

 The demonstrators called attention to an October 2007 incident in which
 private guards working for Syngenta killed a protester taking part in an
 occupation of land owned by the company.

 Via Campesina said in a statement that "no scientific studies exist that
 guarantee that genetically modified crops won't have negative effects on
 human health and on nature."

 It added that on Tuesday, another 900 of its members had entered a
 property owned by the Swedish-Finnish paper giant Stora Enso and ripped
 out non-modified eucalyptus saplings they claimed were illegally planted.