GM | ukwatch.net

GM won't yield a harvest for the world

Tim Holmes — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:12:42 +0000

The biotechnology industry has never been shy of making outlandish claims on behalf of its products. Back in the late 1990s we were sold genetically modified soya and oilseed rape on the promise that it would feed the world. On closer examination, it became clear that these first-generation GM crops were more about intensifying chemical agriculture and sealing corporate control of the food chain than feeding starving babies in Africa. Consumers, especially in Europe, rose in revolt, and the industry was forced into retreat.

But big companies like Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF are not easily kept at bay for long. Now their PR-men have discovered a new line in emotional blackmail: that without GM crops we will be unable to produce enough food in an era of climate change. Transgenic crops will be able to grow in drought-stricken, saline areas, we are assured, helping to augment food supplies in an era of rapidly intensifying crisis. So is it time to follow in the steps of the UK environment minister Phil Woolas and reassess the potential of GM? As Woolas says: “There is a growing question of whether GM crops can help the developing world out of the current food price crisis. It is a question that we as a nation need to ask ourselves.” So is he right?

I doubt it. For starters, the current food price crisis is only partly about supply. Yes, falling harvests have affected the amount of food available, and the recent severe flooding in the US midwest certainly won’t help the situation. But, as with oil, rising demand is the biggest factor driving prices towards the stratosphere. As countries such as India and China get richer and adopt more western diets, they consume more meat, sucking grain off the market to feed growing numbers of livestock. The misconceived rush to biofuels has further intensified the problem, gobbling up vast quantities of corn and soya in order to produce the fuel Americans and Europeans need to feed their addiction to the car. Underlying all this, the human population continues to grow, adding another 80 million mouths every single year.

But look a little closer at the companies which are promising our salvation – and which Woolas rushed to meet yesterday under the aegis of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council – and their motivations seem somewhat less than altruistic. According to the Canada-based ETC Group, big biotech companies have already filed some 532 patents on “climate-ready” genes at patent offices around the world. I doubt these companies have any intention of giving out free seeds to the world’s poorest farmers: instead, they seal up intellectual property rights in transgenic crops and force growers to pay a licence fee. Traditional practices of saving or exchanging seeds are of course forbidden. This concentration of ownership of the food chain is not going to reduce hunger; it is much more likely to intensify it.

I am not arguing that these companies are somehow bad or evil. It is their job to maximise profits – anything else, and their directors would quickly be punished by loss-making shareholders. It is entirely natural therefore that they seek to retain ownership over their inventions, in this case by seeking patents on transgenic seeds. But on the other hand, they should not claim that their products are going to feed the world either – allowing their public relations teams to create soft-focus adverts of hungry people being fed is utterly misleading.

There are also much deeper ethical questions around GM which have never been addressed – and cannot be addressed by science, because they lie outside the scientific arena. One is the question of whether it is ethically justified to mix genetic material from completely unrelated organisms, like viruses and potato plants. GM proponents constantly argue that this is simply another stage on from traditional selective breeding techniques, but this is clearly untrue. Mixing DNA from unrelated species is an entirely different undertaking, and one which raises all sorts of new risks – as well as deeper questions about humankind playing God. In my view, the technology moves entirely in the wrong direction, intensifying human technological manipulation of nature when we should be aiming at a more holistic ecological approach instead.

If something goes wrong with a transgenic organism, this raises a whole new category of risk. Traditional pollution – whether of toxins like DDT or radioactive waste – will mix and eventually be dispersed or broken down in the environment. Genetic pollution on the other hand is self-replicating because it is contained in living organisms; once released, it can never be recalled, and possibly never controlled as GM superweeds, bacteria or viruses run rampant and breed. I am not raising scare stories here: there are countless cases recorded internationally now where GM crops have begun to infest supposedly organic or GM-free fields.

It may be, as Woolas suggests, that we need to swallow these ethical and ecological concerns in an era where rapidly rising global temperatures and diminishing oil supplies are already putting serious constraints on food production. Would I be prepared to reconsider my opposition to GM so that a million Sudanese or Ethiopians don’t have to watch their children starve as the rains fail once again? Yes, of course. But am I prepared to accept GM just so that rich consumers – whether in Beijing or Birmingham – can drive around in biofuelled SUVs? No. Which of these options is more likely is not about technology or science, it’s about economics and social policy. And that requires us to keep asking difficult questions, and to not be browbeaten by emotionally manipulative advertising from profit-seeking corporations.

No Strain No Gain

Ellie Keen — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:05:18 +0000

AS SCHNEWS GETS TO THE ROOT OF PROBLEMS WITH SEEDY BUSINESS

“Seeds are the very beginning of the food chain. He, who controls the seeds, controls the food supply and thus controls the people.”
Dominique Guillet, Kokopelli

Last week, in France, the independent seed-saving and selling Association Kokopelli were fined €35,000 after being taken to court by corporate seed merchant Baumaux. Their crime was selling traditional and rare seed varieties which weren’t on the official EU-approved list – and, therefore, illegal to sell – thus giving them an ‘unfair trading advantage’. As the European Commission met this week to prepare new legislation for seed control, due in 2009, which will further restrict the geographic movement and range of crop varieties, this ruling will set a dangerous precedent.

Kokopelli, the non-profit French group set up in 1999 to safeguard endangered seed strains, may be driven out of existence by the fine. Their focus is biodiversity, food security, and the development of sustainable organic agriculture and seed networks in the ‘global south’. They have created one of the largest independent collections in Europe – with over 2500 sorts of vegetable, flower and cereals. Other non-government seedbanks are held by large agro-industrial companies like Limagrain, Syngenta and Pioneer – and guess what their main interest is money rather than starving subsistence farmers.

You may think that in an era of mass extinction it would be a no-brainer that we need to protect biodiversity and the heritage of the crop varieties which have been build up over centuries… but no. Since the 1970s, laws in the UK and Europe mean that to sell seeds, the strain needs to be registered – and everything else becomes ‘outlaw’ seeds, illegal to sell. In the UK it costs £300 per year to maintain the registration and £2000 to register a ‘new’ one – which all disadvantages smaller organisations.

Garden Organic in the UK run a Heritage Seed Library (www.organicgardening.org.uk/hsl), and they get around the law by not selling ‘outlaw’ seeds, but getting individual gardeners to become ‘seed guardians’ who pass around seeds for free to other members of the Library. Unlike other seedbanks, seeds are not kept in cold storage, but are living species which are continually grown and allowed to adapt to new environmental factors.

Another law-busting approach is seed swaps – which in recent years have sprouted up and down the country. People freely share seeds for another year’s growing – a co-operative way of maintaining genetic diversity. Most are around February – see www.seedysunday.org for the remaining events this year.

DIGGING THE DIRT

There’s so many types of potato – why not just use the best ones and forget the rest? Seed varieties which have been developed over the centuries have adapted to environments, and the genepool has to survive unforeseen factors such as pests and diseases – or climate change. The Irish potato famine was caused by an over-reliance on blight afflicted spuds, or, to take another example, a variety of cauliflower grown in Cornwall was abandoned in the 1940s for a French cauli which gave a higher yield, but turned out to be vulnerable to fungal ringspot – but the old ringspot-resistant Cornish type is now extinct.

Limiting the varieties means limiting the genetic base – presumably to leave GM technology in the clear as the only option.

While mass extinctions are taking place in natural ecosystems, the same has taken place in domesticated seeds. Today there are only half a dozen apple types grown in the UK, down from 2,000 a century ago. Over 90% of crop types listed in the US have been lost in 80 years, and China now grows fifty types of rice, down from 8,000 just twenty years ago. The whole human population is supported by just 30 main crop varieties – a recipe for disaster.

LIFE INC.

Originally laws regarding seeds were brought in during the 1920s – mostly to regulate quality and make sure they did what they said on the tin, and not disease ridden, full of stray weed seed or stones. At the time these laws were a good thing but guess what! It’s all been twisted around and now companies use these and subsequent laws to get control of the market. By cutting out the independent networks of farmers, gardeners, and independent seed-sellers – on a worldwide scale – ten companies now control two-thirds of seed distribution. And which companies are we talking about? It’s yer bio-tech giants like Monsanto and Syngenta. Unsurprisingly governments around the world are building up the legal framework to support these firms.

When you register a seed type, potentially anyone growing it is liable to pay you royalties – making ‘intellectual property’ out of plants which have evolved over thousands of years. These companies take an interest in the myriad of varieties with a view to splicing genetic traits into other types, and take out patents on the genetic content. Monsanto have a European patent on a type of wheat which is derived from a traditional Indian one, the sort used to make chapatis.

These same companies are narrowing the market down to the few mono-culture crops they are flogging, reducing diversity. Once farmers limit theirs to these few types – often hybrids which produce defective seeds – they are forced to return to ‘the man’ to buy next year’s seed rather than being able to save and use last year’s. This is the next thing down from the prospect of ‘terminator’ seeds – genetically modified to be sterile, and deliberately unable to supply future yields (See SchNEWS 557).

The farmers were in a far stronger position with their traditional varieties which were open-pollinated, carrying a wider genepool, and better able to adapt to new conditions and diseases.

SEWING WILD OATS

Seeds – and ultimately the control over production of food – becomes another front in which communities and individual farmers across the world have to fight against the forces of neoliberalism and corporatisation.

Via Campesino – the international peasants movement – held a gathering last weekend in Austria, bringing together small farmers from sixteen countries on ‘food and power’. They are increasing networking and solidarity amongst farmers across the world both to protect biodiversity and increase the sharing of crop choices and farming techniques. And it’s not just the corporations and large-scale agro-industry they are up against – due to climate change they are being forced to adapt quickly to new environmental factors and more than ever need to pool knowledge and resources.

For more see www.viacampesina.org

JUDGEMENT DAY

But don’t fret – whatever catastrophe, armageddon or ecocide befalls us, measures are at hand to make sure that if we survive a nuclear winter or total desertification, we’ll be able to recreate a bucolic paradise: This Tuesday (26th), Norway opened the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic circle. The vault is over 500 feet inside a mountain, and 130 metres above sea-level – in case the polar ice caps melt. Seeds are stored at below -20 degrees in moisture free packs and it is claimed that many will last a hundred years – longer for some cereals. Maybe after all the cyborg mutant terminator seeds have all long since sprouted legs and run off into the sunset, the traditional common-or-garden varieties will be the ones
saying, “I’ll be back”.

See www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

For more about Kokopelli see www.kokopelli-seeds.com

Into the Valley of DEFRA

Ellie Keen — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:26:43 +0000

Running scared of midnight crop-trashings, the transnational corporations behind GM foods are demanding the right to grow them in secret. DEFRA (govt dept for farming, and er, of the ‘environment’) are looking at new ways of clamping down on direct action. The corporations have warned that trials of GM crops are becoming too expensive to conduct in Britain because of the additional costs of protecting fields from activists. The Agricultural Biotechnology Council, an industry lobby group (slogan: ‘promoting biotechnology in sustainable agriculture’) is pushing for secret locations and stiffer penalties for croptrashers.

Last year only one GM trial went ahead in the UK, of potatoes developed by German company BASF. Two activists were arrested for damage to the trial site, which was later anonymously trashed and the trial abandoned (see SchNEWS 583).

BASF plans to repeat the trial this year, at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridgeshire. Another trial is planned by scientists at Leeds University. Under existing laws, full details of every GM crop trial should be disclosed in advance on a government website, with a six-figure grid reference identifying the precise location of the field.

Last week, Friends of the Earth (FoE), using the Freedom of Information Act, finally obtained – albeit still partial – information which shows that the Government provides at least £50m a year for research into agricultural biotechnology, largely GM crops and food. This generosity contrasts with the £1.6m given last year for research into organic agriculture, in spite of repeated promises to promote environmentally friendly, ‘sustainable’ farming.

They also gained disclosure of letters which showed DEFRA (supposedly the watchdogs over the GM crop process) bending over backwards to accommodate BASF’s needs when it came to the potato trials. Another campaigning group, GM Freeze, got hold of letters clearly demonstrating that DEFRA allowed the biotech giant BASF to help to set the DEFRA conditions for their own trials!

On the 1st of December last year, the company was given permission to plant 450,000 modified potatoes in British fields over the next five years, in a series of 10 trials. In one letter to BASF, a DEFRA official asked, “Please let me know whether or not the conditions as they stand would be agreeable to BASF or whether there are any conditions that would be difficult to meet.”

Well SchNEWS knows who we’ll be rooting for… We won’t stop til the BASFs of this world have had their chips…

See www.mutatoes.org www.gmfreeze.org and

www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/real_food

GM: The Secret Files

Ellie Keen — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:59:59 +0000

Ministers are secretly easing the way for GM crops in Britain, while professing to be impartial on the technology, startling internal documents reveal.

The documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, show that the Government colluded with a biotech company in setting conditions for testing GM potatoes, and gives tens of millions of pounds a year to boost research into modified crops and foods.

The information on funding proved extraordinarily difficult to get, requiring three months of investigation by an environmental pressure group, a series of parliamentary questions, and three applications for the information.

Friends of the Earth finally obtained still partial information last week which shows that the Government provides at least £50m a year for research into agricultural biotechnology, largely GM crops and food. This generosity contrasts with the £1.6m given last year for research into organic agriculture, in spite of repeated promises to promote environmentally friendly, “sustainable” farming.

Publicly ministers claim to be neutral over GM. Four years ago, at the height of controversy about plans to introduce modified crops to Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted that the Government was “neither for nor against” them. The then Environment minister, Elliot Morley, added: “There is an open and transparent process for their assessment and all relevant material will be put in the public domain.” Last month the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, reiterated: “There is no change in the Government’s position.”

But the documents show that ministers have been far from even-handed. One set, obtained by the campaigning group GM Freeze, clearly demonstrate that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) allowed the biotech giant BASF to help to set the conditions for field trials it has conducted on modified potatoes. On 1 December last year the company was given permission to plant 450,000 modified potatoes in British fields over the next five years, in a series of 10 trials. The set of emails and letters between Defra and the company reveal that officials repeatedly went to remarkable lengths to make sure the trial conditions, supposed to protect the environment and farmers, were “agreeable” to BASF.

On 29 September a department official emailed BASF to inform it of a recommendation by the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (Acre), its official advisers on risks to health and the environment from GM, that “the land should be left fallow for two years following each trial” and added “I would like to know whether you think that this is workable for you”. The official pointed out that other EU countries had specified that “berries/true seed should be removed from the trial” but that Acre had “not specified this because the committee believes that this would be a very big job”. The email went on: “If you think this is completely unworkable, I think the committee may be prepared to accommodate a reduction of this fallow period to one year but there may be other conditions (eg removal of flowers/berries).”

The writer added: “In addition to this, Acre has recommended a particular tillage regime, hopefully you are able to accommodate this.”

On 6 October Defra sent BASF a draft of the consent to the trials, adding: “Please let me know whether or not the conditions as they stand would be agreeable to BASF or whether there are any conditions that would be difficult to meet.”

BASF replied on 26 October that it believed that the “probable conditions” were “very agreeable to us”, adding: “We hope that the final conditions will not change too much.”

On 9 November Defra again emailed BASF to check that one of the conditions “does not affect your plans”, and five days later was in touch again to say that it had “redrafted” another “in response to your concerns”.

Yet the department insisted in a written statement last week: “There is no truth in any allegation that Defra was in any way influenced by BASF in relation to the terms under which BASF could conduct trials on GM potatoes in the UK.”

Pete Riley, the campaign director of GM Freeze, said: “That is simply not correct. The documents clearly show that Defra colluded with BASF to ensure that Acre’s conditions for growing their GM crop were to their liking. Its role is to protect the environment and public health. It is supposed to be a watchdog, but the documents reveal it to be the industry’s lapdog.”

Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative environment spokesman, added: “This is a government department that claims to be objective and science-based in its approach to biotechnology, but clearly it has bent over backwards to model its conditions on the requirements of BASF.”

A spokesman for BASF said: “I do not think that they granted us any concessions that would not normally have been granted.”

The funding disclosure came when the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) – which is funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills – revealed that it gave £39.3m to its seven sponsored institutes for research on “agricultural biotechnology” in 2006-07.

The sum has more than doubled, from £15.5m, since 1997, even though the prospects for GM crops in Britain have been declining in this period, with ministers admitting three years ago that none would be grown commercially “for the foreseeable future”.

Besides this “core strategic grant”, the BBSRC also gives tens of millions of pounds a year for similar research to universities and other institutes.

In 2003-04 this sum totalled £27.1m. The BBSRC told Friends of the Earth that it could not provide it with up-to-date information until January, unless it paid a fee of £750, because this “would take considerable effort, beyond the appropriate limit” to assemble. But the figure is believed not to have fallen over the past three years. On top of the BBSRC funding, Defra provided £12.6m for agricultural biotechnology research in 2005-06, the last year for which figures are available.

Nor is it clear how much money goes to genetic modification, since the BBSRC defines agricultural biotechnology as “the application of molecular genetic and other modern biological techniques to crops, livestock and disease-causing organisms”.

It says it is not yet able to provide information on the proportion that has recently been devoted to GM, as opposed to other techniques. But figures on its website show that in 2000-01 about half of its core strategic grant to the seven institutes was spent on the technology.

In contrast, Defra spent £1.6m on research “relating to organic farming”, while BBSRC refuses to provide any funds at all, saying it “does not fund applied work on entire farming systems”.

It justifies spending so much taxpayers’ money on GM before, as it admits, “there is any clear evidence that the public wants them” by saying that research must retain “the flexibility to remain competitive and to respond to changing global situations and changes in consumer demand”.

Yet when the Government officially asked the public, four years ago, about their preferences, 86 per cent said they would not be happy to eat GM foods. By contrast, sales of organic produce rose by 22 per cent last year to break through the £2bn barrier. More than half of Britons now buy it, at least from time to time.

The BBSRC says that its funding for the research on GM crops would continue even if there was “a Europe-wide ban” on growing them commercially.

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth’s food campaigner, said: “The Government’s support for GM crops and foods is out of all proportion to its non-existent benefits, let alone the public’s non-existent desire to consume them.

“Despite continually promising to support sustainable agriculture, it is spending tens of millions on a technology that has fallen flat on its face while starving organic farming, which is producing food that people want to buy.

“It is also staggering that there is no clear information in the public domain on exactly how much money is going into GM research, and that it has proved so hard to get even partial figures out into the light of day.”

A farmer’s story: ‘It’s all about control of food production’

The spectre of GM contamination has cost John Turner dear. A succession of trials near his 250 acre farm in Little Bytham, south Lincolnshire, between 2000 and 2002 forced him to stop growing certain crops – suffering heavy financial losses as a result.

“It was a nightmare and we just felt absolutely powerless to do anything over it at all,” he recalled. “Without any real protection against contamination, we were forced to stop growing crops like maize that could be vulnerable to cross-pollination. It wasn’t easy but it was preferable to the damage that could have been done if our crops were no longer GM-free. We feel that we are in remission at the moment, but every few months there seems to be a new PR push from the GM lobby.”

The facts are being twisted to fit a commercial agenda, according to Mr Turner: “There is no sound science behind the push for GM crops. It’s all about money and control of not only the seeds but also food production from one end to the other. The more I find out about it the less I understand why there has been this impetus to force this technology on farming. It has been hugely over-hyped by those trying to promote it. There are plenty of ways of improving crops that don’t involve swapping genes around.

“But farmers could sleepwalk into using GM crops and by the time they realise the proposed benefits just aren’t there they will not be in a position to go back to a GM-free style of agriculture – that’s the danger and that’s been the experience of farmers in other parts of the world.”