Oppose Obama nomination of Rajiv Shah to head US AID

Excerpt:

Shah is on the board of directors for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and was the director of the Gates Foundation's Agriculture Development program. AGRA and the Gates Foundation have been criticized for working closely with Monsanto and its non-profit research arm, the Danforth Center, and promoting GMOs. Links and collaborations include project partnerships, hiring one another's employees and making donations to one another's projects. At the Gates Foundation, Shah supervised Lawrence Kent, who had been the director of international programs at the Danforth Center and Monsanto vice president Robert Horsch, a scientist who led genetic engineering of plants at the seed giant.
In his short tenure at the USDA, he has used connections made at the Gates Foundation, where he facilitated $37 million in grants for genetic engineering, to fill the USDA's Research, Education and Economics mission area with biotech scientists and advocates. These include Roger Beachy who directed Monsanto's Danforth Center, Maura O'Neill who ran a public-private venture dedicated to drawing biotech companies to the Seattle area where the Gates Foundation is based, and Rachel Goldfarb, another former Gates employee.
Shah has used his USDA post to champion genetic engineering and other controversial technologies. In a report to Congress earlier this year on programs delivered by his mission area, Shah emphasized technology over ecology, saying, "We can build on tremendous recent scientific discoveries - incredible advances in sequencing plant and animal genomes, and the beginnings of being able to understand what those sequences actually mean. We have new and powerful tools in biotechnology and nanotechnology."
He has also directed millions of dollars toward GMO research. Shah has already awarded approximately $64 million in grants to improve crop characteristics through plant breeding, genetics and genomics.
These include $46 million through the Specialty Crop Research Initiative. (This money may not go exclusively to GMO research projects, but "science-based tools," "genetics and genomics," and "innovations and technologies," describe the initiative, while there is no mention of organic practices, conventional breeding or integrated pest management.)

end of excerpt.