The GM food debacle

Dennis Breslin dbreslin at ctol.net
Thu Jan 25 08:29:15 PST 2001


Just a little bone to choke on in the trashbin that is our political system. News like this makes me seriously believe that those occupying high office in this land are indeed reptilian pedophilic shapeshifting space goblins. Monsanto...now there's a fine upstanding corporate citizen. This news combined with that about the energy company, Enron, who's reaping huge profits as an energy broker in the California power debacle and who turns out gave millions in donations to Dubya and the Republicans last year makes me want to sit in my own shit so that I might have some physical reminder of what my life is all about. Hey, remembering what you told me about some of the practices that led to medieval sainthood, I'm feeling particularly thirsty for the pus oozing out of open sores...

Carl Remick wrote:
>
> [Ah, the glories of public-private partnership! From today's NY Times.]
>
> Biotechnology Food: From the Lab to a Debacle
>
> By Kurt Eichenwald, Gina Kolata and Melody Petersen
>
> In late 1986, four executives of the Monsanto Company, the leader in
> agricultural biotechnology, paid a visit to Vice President George Bush at
> the White House to make an unusual pitch.
>
> Although the Reagan administration had been championing deregulation across
> multiple industries, Monsanto had a different idea: the company wanted its
> new technology, genetically modified food, to be governed by rules issued in
> Washington — and wanted the White House to champion the idea.
>
> "There were no products at the time," Leonard Guarraia, a former Monsanto
> executive who attended the Bush meeting, recalled in a recent interview.
> "But we bugged him for regulation. We told him that we have to be
> regulated."
>
> Government guidelines, the executives reasoned, would reassure a public that
> was growing skittish about the safety of this radical new science. Without
> such controls, they feared, consumers might become so wary they could doom
> the multibillion-dollar gamble that the industry was taking in its efforts
> to redesign plants using genes from other organisms — including other
> species.
>
> In the weeks and months that followed, the White House complied, working
> behind the scenes to help Monsanto — long a political power with deep
> connections in Washington — get the regulations that it wanted.
>
> It was an outcome that would be repeated, again and again, through three
> administrations. What Monsanto wished for from Washington, Monsanto — and,
> by extension, the biotechnology industry — got. If the company's strategy
> demanded regulations, rules favored by the industry were adopted. And when
> the company abruptly decided that it needed to throw off the regulations and
> speed its foods to market, the White House quickly ushered through an
> unusually generous policy of self-policing.
>
> Even longtime Washington hands said that the control this nascent industry
> exerted over its own regulatory destiny — through the Environmental
> Protection Agency, the Agriculture Department and ultimately the Food and
> Drug Administration — was astonishing.
>
> "In this area, the U.S. government agencies have done exactly what big
> agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do," said Dr. Henry
> Miller, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, who was
> responsible for biotechnology issues at the Food and Drug Administration
> from 1979 to 1994.
>
> The outcome, at least according to some fans of the technology? "Food
> biotech is dead," Dr. Miller said. "The potential now is an infinitesimal
> fraction of what most observers had hoped it would be."
>
> [Full text:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/business/25FOOD.html?pagewanted=all]
>
> Carl
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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