Seeds Of Distraction

The question is as simple as this: do you want a few corporations to monopolise the global food supply? Ifthe answer is yes, you should welcome the announcement the government is expected to make today, that thecommercial planting of a GM crop in Britain can go ahead. If the answer is no, you should regret it. Theprincipal 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 theseeds and the processes which give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can't be grown without theirpatented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companiesand 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 somethingelse. At first they talked of enhancing consumer choice, but when the carrot failed, they switched to thestick. Now we are told that unless we support the deployment of GM crops in Britain, our science base willcollapse. And that, by refusing to eat GM products in Europe, we are threatening the developing world withstarvation. 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 thatmeans 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 letterto the Prime Minister claiming that Britain's lack of enthusiasm for GM crops "will inhibit our abilityto contribute to scientific knowledge internationally".[1] Scientists specialising in this field, theyclaimed, 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. Theyare technological products of science. To claim, as Tony Blair and several senior scientists have done, thatthose who oppose GM are "anti-science" is like claiming that those who oppose chemical weapons areanti-chemistry. Scientists are under no greater obligation to defend GM food than they are to defend themanufacture of Barbie dolls.

This is not to say that the signatories were wrong to claim that some researchers, who have specialised inthe development of engineered crops, are now leaving Britain to find work elsewhere. As the public hasrejected their products, the biotech companies have begun withdrawing from this country, and they are takingtheir funding with them. But if scientists attach their livelihoods to the market, they can expect theirlivelihoods 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 hascome from the government. Its Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, for example, funds 26projects on GM crops and just one on organic farming.[2] If scientists want a source of funding that's unlikelyto 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 emotionalblackmail is the one deployed in the Guardian last week by Lord Taverne, the founder of the Prima PRconsultancy. "The strongest argument in favour of developing GM crops," he wrote, "is thecontribution they can make to reducing world poverty, hunger and disease." [3]

There's little doubt that some GM crops produce higher yields than some conventional crops, or that theycan be modified to contain more nutrients, though both of these developments have been over-hyped. Twoprojects have been cited everywhere: a sweet potato being engineered in Kenya to resist viruses, and vitaminA-enhanced rice. The first scheme has just collapsed. Despite $6m of funding from Monsanto, the World Bank andthe US government, and endless hype in the press, it turns out to have produced no improvement in virusresistance, and a decrease in yield. [4] Just over the border in Uganda, a far cheaper conventional breedingprogramme has almost doubled sweet potato yields. The other, never more than a concept, now turns out not towork even in theory: malnourished people appear not to be able to absorb vitamin A in this form.5 But none ofthis stops Lord Taverne, or George Bush, or the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, from citing them as miraclecures for global hunger.

But some trials of this kind are succeeding, improving both yield and nutritional content. Despite the bestefforts of the industry's boosters to confuse the two ideas, however, this does not equate to feeding theworld.

The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford tobuy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have beencaptured and in some cases monopolised by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech industry isto 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 which are free frompatents and not dependent on the application of proprietary pesticides, and these could well be of benefit tosmall farmers in the developing world. But Taverne and the other propagandists are seeking to persuade us toapprove a corporate model of GM development in the rich world, in the hope that this will somehow encouragethe 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 dowith consumer preferences in Britain. Like the scientists who wrote to Blair, the emotional blackmailers wantto have it both ways: these crops are being grown to feed starving people, but the starving people won't beable 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 beinggrown 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 isexpected to approve today is no exception. If in the next 30 years there is a global food crisis, it will bebecause the arable land which should be producing food for humans is instead producing feed for animals.

The biotech companies are not interested in whether or not science is flourishing or people are starving.They simply want to make money. The best way to make money is to control the market. But before you cancontrol the market, you must first convince the people that there's something else at stake.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Professor Derek Burke and others, 30th October 2003. Open Letter to The Right Honourable Tony Blair MP.

2. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Current Grants awarded byAgri-Food Committee 

3. Dick Taverne, 3rd March 2004. The Huge Benefits of GM Are Being Blocked By Blind Opposition. TheGuardian.

4. New Scientist, 7 February 2004. Monsanto's showcase project in Africa fails. Vol 181 No. 2433.

5. Alex Kirby, 24 September, 2003. 'Mirage' of GM's goldenpromise. BBC News Online.