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GMW:_George_Monbiot_on_GM_commercialisation_-_Starved_of_the_truth

" GM_WATCH "

Tue, 9 Mar 2004 09:09:30 GMT

 

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Starved of the truth

Biotech firms are out to corner the market, so they have to persuade us

something else is at stake

George Monbiot

Tuesday March 9, 2004

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1165076,00.html

 

The question is as simple as this: do you want a few corporations to monopolise

the global food supply? If the answer is yes, you should welcome the

announcement that the government is expected to make today that the commercial

planting of a genetically modified (GM) crop in Britain can go ahead. If the

answer is no, you should regret it. The principal promotional effort of the

genetic engineering industry is to distract us from this question.

 

GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by

them. They can patent the seeds and the processes that give rise to them. They

can make sure that crops can't be grown without their patented chemicals. They

can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed

companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest

and most diverse market of all.

 

No one in her right mind would welcome this, so the corporations must persuade

us to focus on something else. At first they talked of enhancing consumer

choice, but when the carrot failed, they switched to the stick. Now we are told

that unless we support the deployment of GM crops in Britain, our science base

will collapse. And that, by refusing to eat GM products in Europe, we are

threatening the developing world with starvation. Both arguments are, shall we

say, imaginative; but in public relations, cogency counts for little. All that

matters is that you spin the discussion out for long enough to achieve the

necessary result. And that means recruiting eminent figures to make the case on

your behalf.

 

Last October, 114 scientists, many of whom receive funding from the biotech

industry, sent an open letter to the prime minister claiming that Britain's lack

of enthusiasm for GM crops " will inhibit our ability to contribute to scientific

knowledge internationally " . Scientists specialising in this field, they claimed,

were being forced to leave the country to find work elsewhere.

 

Now forgive me if you've heard this before, but it seems to need repeating. GM

crops are not science. They are technological products of science. To claim, as

Tony Blair and several senior scientists have done, that those who oppose GM are

" anti-science " is like claiming that those who oppose chemical weapons are

anti-chemistry. Scientists are under no greater obligation to defend GM food

than they are to defend the manufacture of Barbie dolls.

 

This is not to say that the signatories were wrong to claim that some

researchers who have specialised in the development of engineered crops are now

leaving Britain to find work elsewhere. As the public has rejected their

products, the biotech companies have begun withdrawing from this country, and

they are taking their funding with them. But if scientists attach their

livelihoods to the market, they can expect their livelihoods to be affected by

market forces. The people who wrote to Blair seem to want it both ways:

commercial funding, insulated from commercial decisions.

 

In truth, the biotech companies' contribution to research in Britain has been

small. Far more money has come from the government. Its Biotechnology and

Biological Sciences Research Council, for example, funds 26 projects on GM crops

and just one on organic farming. If scientists want a source of funding that's

unlikely to be jeopardised by public concern, they should lobby for this ratio

to be reversed.

 

But the plight of the men in white coats isn't much of a tearjerker. A far more

effective form of emotional blackmail is the one deployed in the Guardian last

week by Lord Taverne, the founder of the Prima PR consultancy. " The strongest

argument in favour of developing GM crops, " he wrote, " is the contribution they

can make to reducing world poverty, hunger and disease. "

 

There's little doubt that some GM crops produce higher yields than some

conventional crops, or that they can be modified to contain more nutrients,

though both these developments have been overhyped. Two projects have been cited

everywhere: a sweet potato being engineered in Kenya to resist viruses, and

vitamin A-enhanced rice. The first scheme has just collapsed. Despite $6m of

funding from Monsanto, the World Bank and the US government, and endless hype in

the press, it turns out to have produced no improvement in virus resistance, and

a decrease in yield. Just over the border in Uganda, a far cheaper conventional

breeding programme has almost doubled sweet potato yields. The other project,

never more than a concept, now turns out not to work even in theory -

malnourished people appear not to be able to absorb vitamin A in this form.

However, none of this stops Lord Taverne, or George Bush, or the Nuffield

Council on Bioethics, from citing them as miracle cures for global hunger.

 

But some trials of this kind are succeeding, improving both yield and

nutritional content. Despite the best efforts of the industry's boosters to

confuse the two ideas, however, this does not equate to feeding the world.

 

The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry

because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the

sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some

cases monopolised by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech

industry is to capture and monopolise the sources of wealth and the means of

production.

 

Now in some places governments or unselfish private researchers are producing GM

crops that are free from patents and not dependent on the application of

proprietary pesticides, and these could well be of benefit to small farmers in

the developing world. But Taverne and the other propagandists are seeking to

persuade us to approve a corporate model of GM development in the rich world, in

the hope that this will somehow encourage the opposite model to develop in the

poor world.

 

Indeed, it is hard to see what on earth the production of crops for local people

in poor nations has to do with consumer preferences in Britain. Like the

scientists who wrote to the prime minister, the emotional blackmailers want to

have it both ways: these crops are being grown to feed starving people, but the

starving people won't be able to eat them unless er ... they can export this

food to Britain.

 

And here we encounter the perpetually neglected truth about GM crops. The great

majority are not being grown to feed local people. In fact, they are not being

grown to feed people at all, but to feed livestock, whose meat, milk and eggs

are then sold to the world's richer consumers. The GM maize the government is

expected to approve today is no exception. If in the next 30 years there is a

global food crisis, it will be because the arable land that should be producing

food for humans is instead producing feed for animals.

 

The biotech companies are not interested in whether science is flourishing or

whether people are starving. They simply want to make money. The best way to

make money is to control the market. But before you can control the market, you

must first convince the people that there's something else at stake.

 

http://www.monbiot.com

 

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