Here is another worthy article on the GM food issue from today's Guardian (UK):
It's business as usual
Jean-Pierre Berlan and Richard C Lewontin show how biotechnology companies are conducting an intensive propaganda war in support of their activities
Monday February 22, 1999 The Guardian
Life has two fundamental and paradoxical properties: the ability to reproduce and multiply, and the ability to adapt, change and evolve. The first has given us farming, the second selection.
Over millions of years this has led to an extraordinary genetic variability both among and within species. In the course of their short history humans have domesticated plants and animals, selecting them and adapting them to their needs by exploiting and expanding this natural variability. But towards the middle of the 19th century, the motivation behind farming changed: instead of being driven by a need to feed and clothe people, making money became the primary consideration.
Seed-producing 'investors' realised that their industry could not become a source of profit if farmers continued to sow grain that they had harvested themselves. By virtue of her prodigious capacity to reproduce, nature became an obstacle to business, whose raison d'etre - profit - is dependent on supply and demand. Because nature's frustrating ability continually to reproduce could not at the time be legally taken away by political means, the only way of achieving the same result was to use biological methods. In time agricultural genetics became devoted exclusively to this cause.
Success has been a while in coming, but last March the United States Department of Agriculture and a private company, Delta and Pine Land Co, patented the aptly-named 'Terminator' technique. This consists of introducing a killer 'transgene' that prevents the germ of the harvested grain from developing. The plant grows normally and produces a harvest, but the grain is biologically sterile. In May last year the multinational Monsanto bought Delta and Pine Land Co and the Terminator patent - by now registered, or soon to be, in 87 countries. Monsanto is currently negotiating exclusive rights to it with the Department of Agriculture.
Also in May, the company tried to woo French public opinion with an expensive advertising campaign about the philanthropic wonders of genetically modified organisms (GMO). Nobody bothered to understand the issues at stake, let alone explain them to the public. In France the media, the scientific community and the French Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Options did not think the subject worthy of public debate.
Terminator is the culmination of a long process of seizing control over living things that began when biological heredity started to become a commodity. In 1907 Hugo de Vries, the most influential biologist of his day, and the man who 'rediscovered' Mendel's laws, was the only person to realise that in an applied science like agricultural genetics, economics took precedence over science. He understood what Monsanto and its ally-competitors use as a guiding principle today: what is profitable affects, or even determines, what is 'scientifically true' .
At the end of the 1930s scientists triumphed with 'hybrid' maize, which was extravagantly feted. The technique of hybridisation, which has become the model for agronomic research all over the world, is now used in around 20 food species. Poultry of every kind and a large number of pigs are also 'hybrids'. Geneticists claim that having different genes - 'hybridity' - is beneficial per se. In reality, geneticists were actually using inbreeding to create sterility.
Until recently the investors could not reveal their true design - the sterilisation of living things - without making it unachievable. The peasantry was a powerful social group. Life was sacred. But peasants are disappearing: they have become farmers, eagerly awaiting the smallest sign of 'progress' capable of delaying their ultimate demise. And life has been reduced to a source of profits in the banal form of strands of DNA.
Numbed by 20 years of neo-liberal propaganda, people have been conditioned to look to science and technology for the answers to society's major political problems, while politicians are content to 'manage'. Small breeding firms have given way to a powerful genetic-industrial complex with ramifications extending into the very heart of research. Terminator shows how this complex now feels so powerful that it no longer needs to hide its quest for control over life itself.
For example, Monsanto, the firm that is most advanced in 'life science' applications, has no compunction about publishing threatening advertisements in American farming journals. Under a banner headline pointing out the cost of planting pirated seed, it reminds farmers who purchased Biotech seed - genetically modified and including a gene for resistance to Roundup, its flagship herbicide - that they are not entitled to keep any of the harvested grain for use as seed the following year. This is 'contractual sterility'.
But the farmer may have bought Roundup Ready grain without signing a contract - from neighbours, for example. In that case the company can prosecute him because the variety is patented. So now we have 'legal sterility'.
Monsanto is using the old familiar response of hiring Pinkerton agency detectives to track down farmers who 'pirate' its seed as well as using more conventional informers: neighbours, crop-spraying companies and seed merchants. To avoid a potentially ruinous lawsuit, more than 100 farmers have been obliged to destroy their crops, pay compensation and allow Monsanto agents to inspect their accounts and their farms for years to come. It is perfectly legal to keep harvested grain to sow the following year: the farmer's only obligation is not to sell that grain to his neighbours. But according to Monsanto, that right does not apply to genetically modified seed that is covered by a patent .
As for the risks of 'biological pollution' and the consequences - quite unknown - of genetically modified varieties for public health and the environment, the genetic-industrial complex's philosophy was clearly summed up by Monsanto's communications director Phil Angell when he said with unusual frankness that his company had 'no need to guarantee the safety of genetically modified food products'; it was only interested in selling as many as possible, and safety was a matter for the Food and Drug Administration. This from the people who paint the benefits of genetic manipulation in such glowing colours .
Monsanto and its ally-competitors,have specialised in the 'life sciences'. These are strange life sciences that conspire against the marvellous property of living things to reproduce themselves and multiply in farmers' fields so that capital can reproduce and multiply in investors' bank accounts. Will we soon be forced to brick up doors and windows to protect candle makers from unfair competition from the sun)? There is no shortage of arguments that the sun should shine for everyone. Here are just four.
First, the wealth of variety was created by peasants all over the world, the Third World in particular. The domestication and selection/adaptation work done by peasants over thousands of years has built up a biological heritage from which the industrialised nations have greatly benefited - and which they have plundered and partly destroyed. American agriculture was built from these genetic resources freely imported from all over the world (the only important species native to North America is the sunflower). If justice still means anything, the US should repay their 'genetic debt' to the world.
Second, we owe the unprecedented increase in yields in the industrial countries, as well as the Third World, to the free movement of knowledge and genetic resources and to public research. (Yields have increased four or five fold in two generations, after taking 12 to 15 generations to double and being no doubt much unchanged for thousands of years before that.) The contribution of private research has been marginal, including in the US with its hybrid maize.
For example, in the course of the 1970s nearly all the hybrids in the US corn belt were the result of crossing two public lines - from the universities of Iowa and Missouri. It is public research, and public research alone, that does all the basic work on improving the populations of plants on which everything depends. Research work is being hampered by the privatisation of knowledge, genetic resources and the techniques for their use. Tired of paying royalties on genetic resources that were snatched from them in the first place, many countries in the southern hemisphere are now trying to stop their circulation.
Third, experience shows that the price of privatised 'genetic progress' is and will be exorbitant. For example, in 1986 a National Agronomic Research Institute (INRA) researcher estimated the additional cost of hybrid wheat seed at between 6 and 8 quintals per hectare. Another researcher, in charge of the INRA hybrid wheat programme recently came up with an even higher figure of 8 to 10 quintals per hectare sown. This means, at the very least, $500 million a year, or the entire INRA budget, for a net gain of scarcely a few quintals - a gain that can be more easily and quickly obtained using lines or varieties produced by the farmer.
Fourth, giving up our rights in living things means giving the genetic-industrial complex a free hand to guide technical progress along those paths that will bring it the most profits rather than those that will be most useful to society. Rambling on about progress in general while ignoring how things are done in practice smacks of deception. As does invoking some alleged 'social demand' in justification of the scientific choices made by the authorities. Public opinion is massively against GMO. There is no 'social demand' for GMO; the term is simply being used as a smokescreen for the demands of the genetic-industrial complex.
The myth of hybrids is easily exposed. On the one hand, farmers want better quality varieties that are more productive per unit cost. But they are unable to specify in what form. Unfortunately, they cannot rely on scientists to tell them that there are a number of routes to improvement and that the choice between a free variety and a hybrid is a political, not a scientific one. Scientists are not political animals, as we know.
On the other hand, investors, looking to maximise the return on their investment, choose the most profitable varietal type: they take the hybrid route of sterile varieties. Whether spontaneously or working to order, researchers set to work, devoting their efforts exclusively to the success of these hybrids. And, sooner or later, the technique is made to work, proving the initial choice was correct. The choice is like a self-fulfilling prophecy - the farmer's demand for better varieties is transformed into a demand for hybrids.
In the fields of applied biology, health and medicine, we are trying to get rid of the great scourges of cancer, obesity, alcoholism, etc. But so far successful treatments for these diseases remain beyond our grasp. The genetic-industrial complex - obsessed with profit - puts itself forward as the solution. Confusing the agent with the cause, it drums into us that these social ills are genetic and therefore individual. The effect is to transform every healthy individual into a potential patient, expanding the market to the limit - as it previously did for seed with hybrids, and as it will do with Terminator.
By cutting themselves off from society in the name of objectivity and technology, biologists are falling victim to their own narrow concept of causality and their 'a-historicity' - easy prey for investors. But the way for researchers to work for the better world that the vast majority of us want is for them to open themselves up to the scrutiny of their fellow citizens. That means scientific democracy.
The genetic-industrial complex is trying to transform political questions into technical and scientific ones so that responsibility for them can be shifted on to bodies it can control. Its experts, dressed in the candid probity and the white coat of impartiality and objectivity, use the camera to distract people's attention. Then they put on their three-piece suits to negotiate behind the scenes the patent they have just applied for, or sit on the committees that will inform public opinion and regulate their own activities. It is a serious thing when democracy no longer has any independent experts and has to depend on the courage and honesty of a few scientists and researchers, as it must, for example, in the nuclear industry.
Such abuses are beginning to elicit a timid reaction. American biological journals, for example, are asking their contributors to declare their personal or family interests in biotechnology companies and their sources of funding. This is the minimum level of transparency that should be asked of any supposedly independent expert. The legal system is also concerned, even if the politicians are not. Last September France's highest court suspended the marketing and cultivation of three varieties of transgenic maize developed by Novartis, after the company had been authorised to proceed by the ministry of agriculture. The court ruled that implementation of of the ministerial decree should be postponed on the grounds of caution.
Do we want to allow a few multinationals to take control of the biological part of our humanity by granting them a right - legal, biological or contractual - over life itself? Or do we want to preserve our responsibility and our autonomy? Will farmers' organisations continue to allow ruinous techniques to be imposed upon them, or will they debate what should be in the farmers' and the public's interest with renewed public research and a network of breeder-agronomists? Finally, what are the intentions of 'public' agronomic research - which for decades has been privatising the material of life economically, and now biologically? There is another way. Turn our backs on the present European policy of allowing life forms to be patented, and declare living things 'the common property of humanity'. And reorganise genuinely public research around this common property in order to block the already well-advanced private hold that is seeking to eliminate any scientific alternative that would make ecologically responsible and sustainable agriculture possible. Guarantee the free movement of knowledge and genetic resources that have made the extraordinary advances of the past 60 years possible. Restore power over living things to the farmers, that is to each one of us. Replace economic warfare and the plundering of genetic resources with international co-operation and peace.
Jean-Pierre Berlan is Director of Research at the National Agronomic Research Institute (INRA); and Richard C. Lewontin is holder of the Alexander Agassiz chair in zoology and professor of population genetics at Harvard.
Cheers, Joe Moryl