The battle over GM foods in Europe, particularly Britain, has become intense. It has implications for the entire capitalist system in food production. It has the potentiality for a trade war between US and European imperialist blocs. It is the twentieth century version of the Boston tea party.
Friends of the Earth is a totally undemocratic organisation, responsible to the wider public only in terms of how well it can win and keep public opinion. It is expert at combining legal and illegal work, or shall we say, debatable legal work, since they know how to walk along the edge of the law.
Fields of GM maize have been trashed in dawn raids in England this year.
But this morning Friends of the Earth announce with the BBC an even more damaging initiative. With the best scientific methods, supervised by Austrian specialists, they have gathered wind samples of pollen from around the GM field and from bee hives. This evidence appears has shaken the government sufficiently to admit that the zone around GM sites designed to avoid pollen contamination may be far too small. It is already clear that the existence of GM crops may make it enormously difficult to market organic honey, but worse, that pollen will escape and mingle with the rest of the biosphere extensively, as of course pollen is evolved to do.
It is vivid illustration that the world is dialectical, not mechanical, and that new methods of production financed by capital for profit, must be 'controlled by social foresight', to take Marx's words to the First International.
US capitalists will eventually have to bow to this democratic and increasingly global movement. But to avoid the prospects of an inter-imperialist trade war, or worse, in the shorter term, activists inside the US must intensify their efforts to campaign for social control of capitalist agriculture. Hopefully without any getting killed, despite the crypto-fascist features in US political culture.
Chris Burford
London