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Starved of the truth (Wednesday, March 10, 2004 -- CropChoice news) -- George Monbiot commentary in 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.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1165017,00.html
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