the global food supply

[Eubulides <paraconsistent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

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