Alexander Cockburn on the UK Crisis over GE Field Trials

From The Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)

By
Alexander Cockburn

GM seeds and virgins, wise and foolish
October 21, 2003

*This article was written with Jeffrey St. Clair.

"It's agricultural asbestos!" That ripe phrase is how one British farmer
described the menu of genetically modified (GM) crops being offered by
Monsanto, a food biotechnology company in the United Kingdom. It became a
rallying cry for farmers and environmentalists across Britain seeking to
keep GM seeds out of English soil. For its part, Monsanto, and the Blair
government, dismissed such charges as the ravings of Luddites. But now, a
three-year study by British scientists, commissioned by Blair's own
environment minister, Michael Meacher, reveals that the environmental risks
of GM crops may be even greater than previously believed.

The Farm-Scale Evaluation study, conducted by the Royal Society,
is the first large-scale field test of GM crops. It compared the
biodiversity in fields planted with three GM crops -- corn, sugar beet and
oilseed rape -- with the crop of similar non-GM crops in adjacent fields.
The study found that the super-charged pesticides required to grow GM crops
dealt a severe blow to local farmland wildlife species, killing bees,
butterflies, insects, wildflowers and birds. The GM version of RoundUp is so
potent that it kills almost every non-GM plant in its path, including non-GM
versions of the crops themselves. The study's findings, ignored by the U.S.
press, landed on the front pages of the London papers at the end of last
week, striking yet another blow to the Blair government, which nuzzled up to
Monsanto early on, despite condemnations from Prince Charles and hostile
poll numbers that outpaced even opposition to British involvement in the
Iraq war.

A few days before release of the Royal Society's study, some
major insurance groups in the United Kingdom delivered a potentially lethal
punch to Monsanto's hopes by announcing they would not write policies
covering farmers using GM seeds against possible lawsuits, indicating that
GM products could land them in a morass of claims, such as those that
followed the linking of thalidomide and asbestos to fatal or crippling
conditions. The Royal Society report was followed a week later by an even
more damning study produced by English Nature, the Blair government's
wildlife agency, which concluded that the introduction of GM oilseed rape,
in particular, would "seriously degrade" England's bird population. The crop
is Britain's most important for providing feed for birds, producing up to 30
times more sustenance than the average grain fields. The RoundUp weed
killers used with the GM crops resulted in a fivefold decrease in seed
production and a 25 percent decline in native flora and fauna.

This has prompted fears that species such as the skylark could
be driven to extinction within 20 years if GM farming goes ahead.
Populations of skylarks in the east of England, which has a large
concentration of oilseed rape, are deemed at particular risk. "These crops
would seriously degrade biodiversity in a short period, says Dr. Brian
Johnson, biotechnology expert for English Nature. "Clearly, this would take
farming in the opposite direction from the Government's stated objectives of
farming less intensely and enhancing farmland bird populations." GM beet
fields fared nearly as bad, showing 40 percent fewer wildflowers in field
margins than in the adjacent non-GM crop fields.

Monsanto, clearly on the run, says it's abandoning Europe for
now. Following Bill Clinton's lead, Blair stocked his cabinet with Monsanto
flacks and fought off attempts by the European Union to ban GM crops. The
lone holdout in the Blair camp was Meacher, the environment minister, who
vowed last year that the government would ban the crops if the studies
produced negative results. But Blair sacked him last year, after Meacher
publicly savaged Blair's support of the Monsanto machine. So far, the top
levels of the Blair government have taken a low-key posture about the study,
saying only that they will "carefully reflect" on the results. All this hits
Monsanto, already bruised by declining sales, at a bad time. A week after
the British study was released, the agricultural-chemical giant announced
that it was laying off 10 percent of its U.S. workforce in a desperate
attempt to slash costs associated with its RoundUp and biotech business.

If there's any hope for the company, it probably lies here in
the United States rather than Europe. Americans don't like the idea of
eating GM food, but, thanks to an indifferent press, they also know next to
nothing about it. A case in point: A recent survey by the Food Policy
Institute at Rutgers University found that 75 percent of Americans believe
that their palette has never been contaminated by GM foods. Yet, almost
everyone in the United States has eaten lots of GM foods. It's part of our
daily diet. More 80 percent of processed foods contain some GM crops.
"Americans have no idea that foods with genetically modified ingredients are
already for sale in the U.S.," says William Hallman, author of the Rutgers
study. "But the bottom line is: If you eat processed foods, you're probably
eating GM ingredients."

It's not just a matter of processed foods. A recent report from
the Department of Agriculture shows that GM crops are rapidly monopolizing
the fields of the farm belt. More than 80 percent of U.S. soybean fields are
planted with GM seeds. Similarly, GM seeds account for nearly 75 percent of
cotton and 40 percent of corn grown in the United States. One reason so many
Americans remain ignorant about the prevalence of GM foods in the U.S. diet
is that Monsanto and other biotech companies, with the help of the Clinton
and Bush administrations, have fended off calls to label GM foods. The
Rutgers study showed that 94 percent of those polled want labels on foods
with GM ingredients. The Monsantos of the world know that labels represent a
death knell for their business. After all, three out of four Americans
believe they are GM virgins.

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS
SYNDICATE, INC.