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The Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut (CT NOFA) has launched a campaign to educate consumers about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the environment and food supply. GMO crops pose a great threat to small-scale agriculture, biodiversity, food security and consumer rights.  GMO crops have failed to make agriculture more sustainable or feed the world as the biotechnology industry promised, according to The Global Citizens Report on the State of GMOs, released by Navdanya International and the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture.

In June of 2011, CT NOFA joined the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and over 80 other plaintiffs in suing Monsanto to protect independent or organic farmers from patent infringement charges should their non-GMO crops be contaminated with Monsanto’s patented genes.  “Hopefully this suit will raise awareness here and all over the country about the dangers of GMOs and slow the pollution they are spreading into the seeds which sustain us” explained CT NOFA’s Executive Director, Bill Duesing.  In October, CT NOFA and Yale Law School co-hosted “Suing Monsanto: Intellectual Property, Genetic Contamination and Farmers’ Rights”, a talk by Dan Ravicher, the lawyer representing organic producers in OSGATA et al. v. Monsanto and the Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation.