UK ok's GM maize

[Guest guest]

" 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. "

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1165517,00.html

GM maize given official go-ahead

Tuesday March 9, 2004

 

The government today took the historic - and possibly irreversible -

decision to allow commercial GM crops to be grown in Britain for the

first time. [.. more ]

 

Comment

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1165077,00.html

---

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

 

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.

 

· www.monbiot.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1165077,00.html