- The sound of one hand clapping should greet the behaviour
of "rational" scientists, businessmen and politicians in the
debate on the future of genetically modified food.
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- One member of the government's review panel resigned
because of the its "naive" and unbalanced approach. Another formally
complained that he was threatened with the loss of research funding if
he was critical of GM technology. In the most staggering example of a conflict
of interest in recent times, a Monsanto employee was reportedly commissioned
to write the first draft of the panel's report concerning GM safety issues.
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- Icing on this less than rational cake was added by David
King, chairman of the panel and chief government scientific adviser, who
used the experience of the US to reassure the public. GM food has been
eaten there since around 1996 with no obvious adverse effects. But absence
of evidence of harm is not evidence of the absence of harm.
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- What emerges is an automatic cultural bias in the scientific
community towards invasive, hi-tech solutions to complex social, environmental
and economic problems. Regardless of whether or not they are best - or
even appropriate.
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- Because why, after all, do we need GM crops? Even if
the world was short of food, which it is not, available evidence suggests
that using what is called, "sustainable agriculture" - a mixture
of environmental and pro-poor approaches to growing food - brings massively
higher increases in overall productivity than anything achieved through
genetic modification.
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- Consumers and supermarkets do not want them. Only a hard
core of biotech businesses, researchers and their political allies are
bothered.
-
- Floundering for winning arguments, they've settled on
a kind of moral blackmail, the modern equivalent of patriotism being the
last resort of the scoundrel. We should commercially introduce GM crops,
they say, because we need to feed the poor.
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- When this argument was first used aggressively by Monsanto
in the late 1990s, the poor had other ideas. African delegates from Ethiopia
to Burundi, Senegal and Mozambique, at special negotiations of the UN food
and agriculture organisation "strongly" objected that "the
image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant
multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally
friendly, nor economically beneficial to us".
-
- They were convinced that the "feed the world"
argument was a huge (genetically modified) red herring. Since then, the
GM lobbyists just shout louder. George Bush accused the European Union
of starving hungry people because of its caution over GM crops.
-
- Why are the new scoundrels so wrong? The arguments need
repetition. People go hungry because they're either poor, powerless, both,
or have no land to grow food on. GM crops don't change this. Britain's
experience has been enormously problematic. The poor, majority world has
no chance to regulate, monitor or segregate GM crops.
-
- Almost everything scientists are trying to achieve by
genetically modifying crops can be achieved in other less risky ways. Whether
the problem is pest or weed control, drought tolerance, yield or nutrition,
there are countless, though poorly supported, farming methods that can
be used before needing to open pandora's box of genetic tricks. GM advocates
seem only to have discovered the cause of poverty eradication now that
they have something to sell.
-
- Increasingly restrictive global intellectual property
laws, which are a precondition for commercial GM crop technology, further
weaken the bargaining power of poor and hungry. They create a massive market
distortion in the global food system in favour of multinational companies
that already enjoy near-monopoly positions. Most worrying, according to
aid agencies, is that the GM lobby is almost entirely ignorant about how
and why people actually go hungry, and how to change it.
-
- Nature has no advertising budget. Advocates of sustainable
agriculture also tend to be poor and marginalised. The biotech firms, on
the other hand, have armies of PR and sales people, researchers, lawyers
and lobbyists. They fear that there should be a proper comparative assessment
of the relative merits of GM, conventional farming, and sustainable and
organic agriculture, which would most likely show that a mixture of efficient
public distribution systems, sustainable agriculture, land reform, education
and guaranteed basic healthcare would make GM crops at best a rare, final
resort, and more often completely irrelevant.
-
- This is an old cycle repeated. Huge hype around a hi-tech
magic bullet, swiftly followed by brutal logistical, technical and economic
reality.
-
- Remember vitamin A enriched rice, meant to help prevent
blindness in malnourished people? It seemed like such a good idea until
it emerged that you had to eat a truckload to get the required dose. As
Franz Simmersbach of the FAO said: "Its as if vitamin A research makes
researchers go blind!"
-
- Magic is fine when you read Harry Potter, but not when
you live in the real world.
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- á Andrew Simms is policy director of the New Economics
Foundation and author of the forthcoming Limits to Property: How Restrictive
Property Rights Fail the Modern World
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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