H.J. Heinz Co. is taking similar steps. Last week, bowing to public pressure, Monsanto announced it wouldn't market the controversial seed. Today at Rockefeller Center in New York City, the Blue Mountain activists have scheduled a press conference to present a global front against biotech foods. Already, they say, the movement is stirring up interest on university campuses across the country. His group last year sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in federal district court in Washington to demand that foods containing genetically altered ingredients be labeled as such.
Fund raising is a priority for the U.S. groups.
Chris Desser, the coordinator of the Funders Working Group on Biotechnology, San Francisco, says she has reached out to the Ford, Rockefeller and other mainstream foundations. Funding for last week's retreat came from the HKH Foundation, which endows the Blue Mountain mansion, and from Britain's JMG Foundation, which has financed groups opposed to biotech food in the U.K. and France. Lounging on pillow-strewn sofas and sipping red wine from plastic cups, the Blue Mountain activists discussed their next corporate targets. She is a physicist and founder of the anti-GMO Research Institute for Science, Technology and Ecology, in New Delhi. And she compares the Indian demonstrations, in which fields of cotton have been set afire, to Mahatma Gandhi's efforts to end British colonial rule.