if ya can't beat em..lie

[Guest guest]

George Monbiot

Tuesday October 7, 2003

The Guardian (UK)

 

It is curious that this government, which goes to such lengths to show

that it responds to market forces, appears to believe, when it comes to

genetic modification, that the customer is always wrong. Tony Blair may

have spent six years rolling back the nanny state, but he instructs us

to shut up and eat what we're given. The public has comprehensively

rejected the technology; the chief scientist has warned that pollen

contamination may be impossible to prevent; the field trials suggest

that GM threatens our remaining wildlife. Yet the government seems

determined to force us to accept it.

The best way of gauging its intentions is to examine the research it is

funding, as this reveals its long-term strategy for both farming and

science. It seems that the strategy is to destroy them both.

 

The principal funding body for the life sciences in Britain is the

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). It is

currently funding 255 food and farming research projects; 26 are

concerned with growing GM crops, just one with organic production.

 

We're not talking about blue-sky science here, but research with likely

commercial applications. We should expect it to respond to what the

market wants. The demand for organic food in Britain has been growing by

30% a year. We import 70% of it, partly because organic yields in

Britain are low and research is desperately needed to find ways of

raising them. Genetically modified food, by contrast, is about as

popular with consumers as BSE or salmonella.

 

This misallocation of funds should surprise us only until we see who

sits on the committees that control the BBSRC. They are stuffed with

executives from Syngenta, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals,

Merck Sharp & Dohme, Pfizer, Genetix plc, Millennium Pharmaceuticals,

Celltech and Unilever. Even the council's new " advisory group on public

concerns " contains a representative of United Biscuits but no one from a

consumer or environmental group. What " the market " (which means you and

I) wants is very different from what those who seek to control the

market want.

 

All the major government funding bodies appear to follow the same line.

The Homegrown Cereals Authority spends £10m of our money every year to

" improve the production, wholesomeness and marketing of UK cereals and

oilseeds so as to increase their competitiveness " . It lists 67 wholesome

research projects on its website. Only one is designed to increase the

competitiveness of organic farming. The Meat and Livestock Commission

funds no organic projects at all, but it is paying for an investigation

into the potential of the gene whose absence causes " double muscling " in

cattle. Deletion of the gene leaves the animal looking like Arnold

Schwarzenegger, though with rather more brains. When pictures of a

double-muscled bullock were published recently, the public responded

with outrage, especially when the welfare implications were explained.

It is not easy to see how the results of this research could or should

ever be commercialised. But the commission regards the possibility of

engineering cattle with a defective muscling gene as " an exciting

development " .

 

These distortions are as bad for the scientific community as they are

for farmers and taxpayers. As consumers continue to insist that there is

no future for these crops in Britain, the heads of the research

institutes are now warning that British scientists will be forced to

leave the country to find work.

 

Michael Wilson, the chief executive of the government-funded body

Horticulture Research International, recently told the Guardian that

" Britain is lining itself up to become an intellectual and technological

backwater " . If so, it will be partly as a result of his efforts. Wilson,

who describes himself as " evangelical " about GM, has spent the past

three years switching his institute's research away from conventional

breeding. He can hardly complain about the brain drain when he has tied

the careers of his scientists to a technology nobody wants.

 

" The way things are going, " according to Christopher Leaver, the head of

plant science at Oxford University, " plant biotechnology is going to be

stillborn here. " Well, the way things are going is very much a result of

the way he has directed them. Until this summer, he sat on the BBSRC's

governing council. At the university, he has engineered a brain drain of

his own by closing the Oxford Forestry Institute (perhaps the best of

its kind in the world) and shifting the focus of his department from

whole organisms and ecosystems to molecular biology and genetic

engineering. Undergraduates want to study whole systems, so the few

remaining lecturers with this expertise are massively overworked, while

the jobs of the rest are threatened by the lack of demand for the

technology he favours.

 

The shift is not entirely the fault of men such as Wilson and Leaver.

The government's research assessment exercise, which determines how much

money academic departments receive, grades them according to the numbers

of papers they produce and the profile of the journals in which they are

published. You can spend 30 years studying the ecology of coconut pests

in the Trobriand Islands, only to discover that you can't publish the

results anywhere more prestigious than the Journal of Trobriand Island

Coconut Science. But a good genetic engineering team can publish a paper

in Nature or Science every few months, simply by repeating a stereotyped

series of tests.

 

 

Because they cannot persuade us to eat what we are given, many of

Britain's genetic engineers are turning their attention to countries in

which people have less choice about what or even when they eat. The

biotech companies and their tame scientists are using other people's

poverty to engineer their own enrichment. The government is listening.

Under Clare Short, Britain's department for international development

gave £13m to researchers developing genetically engineered crops for the

poor nations, on the grounds that this will feed the world.

 

Earlier this year, Aaron deGrassi, a researcher at the Institute of

Development Studies at Sussex University, published an analysis of the

GM crops - cotton, maize and sweet potato - the biotech companies are

developing in Africa. He discovered that conventional breeding and

better ecological management produce far greater improvements in yields

at a fraction of the cost. " The sweet potato project, " he reported, " is

now nearing its 12th year, and involves over 19 scientists ... and an

estimated $6m. In contrast, conventional sweet potato breeding in Uganda

was able in just a few years to develop with a small budget a well-liked

virus-resistant variety with yield gains of nearly 100%. " The best

improvement the GM sweet potato can produce - even if we believe the

biotech companies' hype - is 18%. But conventional techniques are of no

interest to corporations, as they cannot be monopolised. If the

corporations aren't interested, nor is the government.

 

Those of us who oppose the commercialisation of GM crops have often been

accused of being anti-science, just as opponents of George Bush are

labelled anti-American, and critics of Ariel Sharon anti-semitic. But

nothing threatens science more than the government departments that

distort the research agenda in order to develop something that we have

already rejected.