Giant biotech companies are pressing for the revival of a GM technology
so damaging to the world's poor that it has been suspended by worldwide
agreement.
The drive to rehabilitate the so-called "terminator technology" - designed
to deny hundreds of millions of poor farmers the ability to replant seeds from
their own crops - is expected to reach a peak at an international conference in
Malaysia this week.
Senior managers have been trying to rebrand it as a green technology that
will solve the spread of genes from GM plants to other crops and weeds.
Delegates to the Malaysia conference say that they are expecting a big push next
week by biotech firms and the Bush administration.
This comes at an embarrassing time for the Government, which is drawing up
plans to persuade the public that GM crops would particularly benefit developing
countries.
Terminator technology - officially classified as a Genetic Use Restriction
Technology (Gurt) - would make the seeds produced by the GM plants
sterile.
This means that many of the 1.4 billion poor Third World farmers who save
seed from their crop each year and resow it to produce the next harvest would no
longer be able to do so. They would have to buy new seeds from the biotech
companies. Many would not be able to afford them, and would go out of
business.
Such was the public and scientific outcry when it was first developed that
Monsanto was forced to make "a public commitment not to commercialise sterile
seed technology". The following year the world's governments agreed to place it
under an international moratorium.
However, the International Seed Federation, which represents the world seed
industry, insists that it presents "a possible technical solution" to the
increasing problem of contamination of conventional and organic crops by genes
from GM plants.
A paper written for the ISF by Roger Krueger of Monsanto and Harry Collins
of Delta & Pine Land, the company that holds the most patents in the
technology, dismisses concerns about its ill-effects as "conjecture", and says
"Gurts have the potential to benefit farmers in all size, economic and
geographical areas".
However, Monsanto stresses it stands by its commitment not to develop the
technology.
Many developing countries made a determined attempt last week at a
conference of the parties to the international Convention on Biological
Diversity in Kuala Lumpur to have the technology banned outright. But the
attempt was successfully resisted by Canada, Australia and Brazil, acting as
surrogates for the United States, which has refused to join the
convention.
Hope Shand of the ETC pressure group said yesterday: "We believe that if
terminator technology is accepted ... it will be used everywhere to enforce
industry monopoly by preventing farmers from saving and reusing their
seeds."
Meanwhile, Downing Street officials have told Tony Blair that a decision to
give the green light to GM maize will further damage his credibility, with
dangerous consequences for the next general election.
They have warned him that it has become a crucial issue of trust, at a time
when public faith in him has almost disappeared.
The alarm at the centre of the Government has deepened with the outcry
after last week's leak of Cabinet subcommittee meetings. These revealed a
discussion of how to spin the announcement of a decision to approve GM maize
with "careful presentation" so that public opposition can be "worn down".
Labour is going to give us GM crops whether we want them or not … what does
that say about British democracy?
By Ian Bell
WHEN the jury is still out, you can’t have a verdict. You can have
opinions, even faith, but until those who have studied the evidence reach a firm
conclusion your views are not worth a great deal. Being a new Labour minister,
even a prime minister, does not grant you supernatural powers of prophecy and
insight denied to the rest of us. That’s the nub of the argument where
genetically modified crops are concerned. The government knows only too well
that a large majority of people don’t want their food modified. It knows, too,
that if the public’s questions were properly addressed and properly answered,
opposition would probably melt away. Show beyond doubt that the stuff is safe,
in this age of mad cow disease and Sars, and we might just swallow it. Instead,
according to papers leaked last week, the Blair administration intends to allow
the first crop of GM maize in the name of British science regardless of what the
public thinks. A government that claims to be in the middle of a “Big
Conversation” with voters has decided to turn off its hearing aid. Typically, it
presents this as a staunch refusal to “take the easy way out”. Most of us know,
however, that the hard way, unthinkable to the Blairites, would be to continue
to resist the demands of the United States and its agri-business.
That lobby
tends to present GM as the latest gee-whiz way to save the world. Plant the new
seeds, they say, and hunger will be banished among the wretched of the Earth. It
sounds like a splendid aspiration. But why, then, are the GM companies so
fanatically keen on forcing their way into the European market? Starvation isn’t
exactly an issue on this side of the Atlantic. If anything, we are glutted with
foods of every variety. Obesity is our problem, not hunger.
Last year, in any case, the government held what it called a national GM
debate. (Were you consulted? Me neither). This produced a disappointing, not to
say dismal, result for GM’s proponents. More than 80% of those polled didn’t
want modified foodstuffs and only 2% said they would knowingly let such
substances pass their lips. Other surveys have suggested that opposition is
perhaps less deeply rooted, but none have established anything like a majority
for tampering with food. Still the government, knowing nothing for sure,
maintains that it knows better.
In fact, the science it has commissioned is scarcely compelling. A
five-year trial by the advisory committee on releases to the environment ended
in January with a report concluding that GM maize is preferable to maize
saturated with herbicides (right answer, wrong question), but establishing that
both GM oil-seed rape and GM sugar beet were harmful to the environment. This
confirmed previous findings, including those of the government’s own chief
scientist, Sir David King. Still the government presses on.
It does not know – because no-one knows – how to prevent GM crops from
contaminating ordinary crops, particularly organic crops. It cannot say –
because no-one can say – what economic benefit there is to be had from GM,
though its own Cabinet Office has struggled to identify any benefit whatsoever.
It cannot even begin to predict – because it chooses not to predict – whether
the imposition of GM will provoke civil disobedience, or worse, from
environmentalists and others. It is walking into a minefield, not a maize field,
and appears not to grasp the fact.
The government’s real motives are, as usual, not hard to fathom. You can
just about summarise them in a sentence: what America wants, America must have.
The US, with Canada and Argentina at its heels, has gone to the World Trade
Organisation with a suit maintaining that the European Union’s moratorium on GM
– no permission to plant until its safety is proven – is illegal. The Americans
choose to believe that listening to the concerns of the EU’s citizens is just an
excuse for protectionism. Thus the obedient Blairites, with no other shred of
justification, are doing America’s work. At the risk of sounding melodramatic,
our government is taking the side of a foreign power against its own people.
Well, if Iraq demonstrated nothing else it showed that such is a tenet,
these days, of what passes for British foreign policy. It also illustrates a
wilful misunderstanding, in some quarters, of what the anti-globalisation
campaign is about. We can argue about capitalism and free trade – put me down as
a practising heretic – but when commercial interests are elevated above the will
of a country’s people the real debate is about democracy.
Those leaked papers allegedly state explicitly that the government has a
clear understanding of the depth of opposition to GM. As a member of the EU’s
inner council, that government also knows that the wishes of an entire continent
are at issue. It prefers, nevertheless, to let the GM genie out of a bottle to
which it can never be returned.
That, I suspect, is what troubles ordinary people most. We are talking
about a process that is irreversible. The biotech industry, we can be certain,
will not lift a finger to prevent the contamination of organic crops:
contamination is in its interests. Last week, indeed, Paul Rylott, head of
biosciences at BayerCropScience, told The Guardian that his industry had no
intention whatever of funding compensation for organic farmers, as the
government apparently proposes.
Compensation was unnecessary, said Rylott, and “silly” because simple
precautions, such as keeping GM crops at a set distance from ordinary crops, was
all the protection organics require. You can sense the way the wind is blowing,
and it is carrying modified seeds.
I am not, I hope, guilty of Luddism, or whatever the environmental
equivalent to machine-smashing might be. Genetic research has a vast potential
for good; the possibilities flowing from the human genome project are endless.
But what sort of lunatic proposes altering a fundamental resource – and
they don’t come much more fundamental than food – in an irreversible way without
a cast-iron certainty that they know precisely what they are doing? In the
matter of GM food we can all agree that opinion is divided, but that ought to be
enough, of itself, to instil maximum caution. They will tell you that no-one
should have a veto on scientific progress. That, it appears, is one of the
government’s central arguments. It says that a ban on GM would be “irrational”
given its science policy and its commitment to “the UK science base”. This
sounds impressive until you remind yourself how the same government would react
to any attempt at human cloning in Britain.
That government also imposes restrictions, though not enough of them, on
experiments with animals. Science is tightly regulated in this country, yet,
when American big business comes calling, restraint disappears.
Which, in the long run, is more important: supporting a nascent, home-grown
(as it were) organics industry, or co-operating with foreign multi-nationals
whose products might well put an end to organic food? Is it better for a
government to listen to its people, or ease the way of the US in its battle with
the EU, our treaty partners? In this affair the only jury that should count is
being denied a vote, and not for the first time.
At bottom, all of this illustrates why the struggle to control
globalisation matters. The international argument over GM has its roots in a
free trade regime that allows a dominant economy, in this case America, to
impose its will on others simply because the unimpeded flow of goods and
services is held to be sacred. That same regime has forced privatisation, theft
at public expense, on most of the planet and it has a nasty habit of promoting
wars, trade wars and shooting wars.
Anyone who tells you, for example, that the US has absolutely no commercial
interests in Iraq is a liar or a fool. Anyone who suggests, equally, that the
government’s determination to introduce GM stems from a devotion to science
should take the matter up with a university researcher working for a pittance.
Globalisation is the issue.
Next, according to the leaked document, will come a propaganda campaign
promising a land of GM milk and GM honey. The truth will be genetically modified
from its present, simple state – we just don’t know enough – to something far
grander and less honest by tame MPs and scientists employed by the biotech
industry. One thing I guarantee: it won’t be good for your digestion.
22 February 2004