Biotech Bullies on the Rampage

The Guardian (London)
August 21, 2001

Market Enforcers
Biotech Firms Found Persuasion Didn't Work, So They Are Using A New Tactic:
Coercion

By: George Monbiot

I've always been a little uncomfortable about the term Frankenstein food".
It smacks of both sensationalism and trivialisation. In politics, as in
shopping, the cheaper the device, the less likely it is to last. But the
label is becoming ever more germane. For not only are GM crops cobbled
together out of bits of other organisms, but they have also begun to
demonstrate a ghoulish ability to rise from the dead, given a sufficient
application of power.

A year ago, the biotech companies' grave had been dug. They had failed
repeatedly to refute the three principal arguments against deployment: that
GM crops enhance corporate power by allowing companies to patent the food
chain; that the long-term safety tests to establish whether or not they pose
a risk to human health have never been conducted; and that consumers don't
want to buy them. The companies might bluster about children in the
developing world turning blind if we don't eat up our GM cornflakes in
Europe, but there's no shortage of evidence to suggest that corporate
control of the food chain has devastating effects on nutrition. But, though
we have won the argument, we are losing the war. For the GM companies have
rediscovered the old way of dealing with reluctant customers: if persuasion
doesn't work, use force. The new opium wars are being waged in the fields of
North America, where many farmers are beginning to shy away from engineered
seed. GM crops, they have found, are harder to sell. There is evidence that
some varieties yield less while requiring more herbicide. But farmers are
swiftly coming to see that the costs of not planting GM seed can greatly
outweigh the costs of planting it.

Last month, lawyers warned a farming family in Indiana that the only way
they could avoid being sued by the biotech company Monsanto was to sow their
entire farm with the company's seeds. Two years ago, the Roushes planted
just over a quarter of their fields with the company's herbicide-resistant
soya. Though they recorded precisely what they planted where, and though an
independent crop scientist has confirmed their account, Monsanto refuses to
accept that the Roushes did not deploy its crops more widely. It is now
demanding punitive damages for the use of seeds they swear they never sowed.
The Roushes maintain that they are, in effect, being sued for not buying the
company's products. So next year, like hundreds of other frightened farmers,
they will plant their fields only with Monsanto's GM seeds. Like the opium
forced upon a reluctant China by British gunboats, once you've started using
GM, you're stuck with it.

But the solution proposed by the Roushes' lawyers was a prudent one. In
April, a Canadian farmer called Percy Schmeiser was forced to pay Monsanto
Dollars 85,000, after a court ruled that he had stolen Monsanto's genetic
material. Schmeiser maintained that the thinly-spread GM rape plants on his
farm were the result of pollen contamination from his neighbour's fields,
and he had done all he could to get rid of them. But Monsanto's proprietary
genes had been found on his land whether he wanted them or not. Following
the time- honoured convention that the polluted pays, Mr Schmeiser was
forced to compensate the company for what he insists was invasion by its
vegetable vermin.

Where the courts won't enforce compliance, governments will. In 10 days'
time, Sri Lanka will introduce a five-year ban on genetically engineered
crops, while scientists seek to determine whether or not they are safe. The
United States, worried that thorough testing could destroy the value of its
biotech companies, has threatened to report the ban to the World Trade
Organisation.

In Britain, the Welsh Assembly voted unanimously that Wales should be a
GM-free zone. But the Westminster government has ignored the ruling and
licensed trials of Aventis's genetically modified maize there. The trials
are supposed to determine whether or not the new variety is safe to plant.
But Aventis has already received consent to grow it commercially, even if
the experiments" show that planting is an ecological disaster. Welsh
activists suggest that the purpose of the trials is to lend credibility to a
done deal.

Monsanto will never repeat the mistake of seeking to persuade consumers that
they might wish to purchase its products. In future, it won't have to. Like
the other biotech companies, it has been buying up seed merchants throughout
the developing world. In some places farmers must either purchase GM seeds -
and the expensive patent herbicides required to grow them - or plant nothing
at all.

The European environment commissioner Margot Wallstrom warned in March that
the EU could be sued by biotech firms if it upheld its ban on the sale of
new GM foods. We cannot afford," she explained, to lose more years of not
aiding the biotechnology industry". Biotech companies have been pressing to
raise Europe's legal limit for the contamination of conventional crops with
modified genes: in time, they hope, genetic pollution will ensure that there
is so little difference between GM and non-GM" food that consumers will give
up and accept their products. The US government has begun pressing for a
worldwide ban on the labelling of GM food, to ensure that consumers have no
means of knowing what they're eating.

The monster has begun to walk. The technology which, we were promised, would
broaden consumer choice, is becoming compulsory. This is the free trade
which George Bush and Tony Blair have promised to the world. It is the
freedom which, they have assured us, will overthrow vested interests,
challenge market concentration, enhance competition and empower consumers.
It is the freedom we must be forced to swallow.

When protesters against this forced emancipation were arrested by the
freedom-loving police in Genoa, some of them were tortured, then shown a
photograph of Mussolini. They were obliged to salute it and shout Viva il
Duce!" Presumably because this enthusiastic defence of market forces is
compatible with free trade, neither Tony Blair nor Jack Straw saw fit to
complain. Had they done so, they would have spoken to one of the most senior
members of Italy's borderline-fascist government, the foreign minister
Renato Ruggiero. Before becoming a minister, he was director-general of the
World Trade Organisation, the body responsible for enforcing free trade.
Mr Ruggiero has not changed his politics: he has long upheld the right of
the strong to trample the weak, of corporate power to crush human rights.
The organisation he ran has now chosen as the venue for its next summit
meeting one of the most repressive nations in the rich world. In November,
WTO delegates will be discussing freedom in Qatar, safe in the unassailable
fortress of a country which tolerates no dissent. This is the force behind
market forces.

It has become fashionable of late to claim that we can buy our way out of
trouble: that through the judicious use of shares and shopping we can force
companies to change the way they trade. But it is surely not hard to see
that consumer choice is an inadequate means of curbing corporate power.
Trapped inside PFI hospitals or sponsored schools, forced through lack of
choice to buy cars, shop at superstores and eat GM food, we cannot escape
the coercion which facilitates free trade. If market forces operate outside
the market, then so must we.

<g.monbiot@zetnet.co.uk>