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broke with the government quite publicly over the GMO issue, with 500 groups sending
Lula a letter of personal repudiation in October 2003 (Hochstetler 2004). The
government responded by hastily including NGOs in the final stages of drafting a new
Law on Biosafety which went to the National Congress at the end of the month. The
proposed legislation followed civil society organizations and the then-current legal
decisions, and gave the Ministry of the Environment the major role in performing
environmental impact assessments of GMOs before they could be widely grown and sold.
The lower body of the Congress (the Câmara) approved a heavily amended text in
February 2004 that kept these components while a “Born Again Bloc” added prohibitions
on stem cell research. The legislative project was transformed again in the Senate,
however, where September 2004 revisions placed the CTNBio in charge of evaluating
genetic modifications, allowed the planting of GM soy, with labeling, and reintroduced
stem cell research. These revisions followed the June 2004 court decision that upheld the
CTNBio as a constitutional choice for handling biotechnology and biosafety. As the ISA
met in March 2005, the Câmara reapproved the bill in its Senate version and it currently
awaits Lula’s signature. Physically handicapped protesters in favor of stem cell research
strongly lobbied for the bill and caught public and legislative attention (Jornal da
Câmara March 4, 2005:4-5). IDEC, Greenpeace, and others are hoping to persuade Lula
to veto the articles placing CTNBio in charge, and plan legal challenges, if necessary. In
the meantime, the Brazilian case can be summed up as another indeterminate level – with
two potentially intractable and opposed sublevels. Each of them has behaved much more
consistently than the national government, restricting its scope for autonomous action.
Convention