Contradictions over GM Organisms Intensify

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Contradictions over GM Organisms Intensify

Michael Meacher Says that Sacked by Blair over GM Foods

Biotech Wars: Food Freedom Vs Food Slavery

Ehsan Masood, 17 June 2003, Source: SciDev.Net

Let's do a Monsanto

GM Nation? The public debate

Contradictions between the US and the European Union over the EU's ban on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in food intensified ahead of the EU-US summit.

The European Commission on 24 June, strongly denied accusations made on Monday by US President George W. Bush that the EU's stance on GMOs is contributing to famine in Africa.

"It is false we are anti-biotechnology and anti-developing countries," Commission spokesperson Gerassimos Thomas said. "These things said by the United States are simply not true."

He also added that the EU donates seven times more in development aid to Africa than the US.

European critics also lashed out at Mr Bush on Tuesday, saying his comments were more about promoting the biotech industry than ending world hunger, CNN said.

The US has been putting intense pressure on the EU to lift its 'moratorium' on GM foods, including taking the case to the World Trade Organisation. An initial ruling could come next spring.

The US has sought to introduce GM food to Africa as food aid, but African countries are reluctant to accept GM food because this would mean they could not export produce to the EU market, it is reported.

At the same time, the contradictions within the British government over the issue came into the open with the removal of Environment Minister Michael Meacher in the Cabinet reshuffle.

We are posting source material in this issue of WDIE relating to the issue of GM organisms and the opposition to the imposition of their use in the interests of the US monopolies without proper scientific debate so that the people can decide.

The former Environment Minister Michael Meacher has said that he was sacked by Tony Blair. He told the Independent on Sunday on June 22 that the government downplayed research critical of GM foods.

Michael Meacher, who had served in his job since 1997, accused the government of deliberately undervaluing negative research findings on the safety of GM foods. He said scientific reports that pointed to possible damaging effects on humans were "widely rubbished in government circles". And he said the debate on GM foods had been deliberately stifled in the face of pressure from biotechnology companies.

A spokesman for the Department of the Environment said that the government regarded both health and the environment as "top priorities". "Both GM crops and foods have to undergo rigorous safety assessments before they can get approvals," he said. "These approvals require there is no risk to health or the environment."

The spokesman also pointed out a public debate on the GM issue was currently under way, and people were welcome to contribute their views.

In the newspaper article, the ex-environment minister said that tests that had been carried out on the effects on human health of GM foods were "scientifically vacuous", and warned the government against "rushing" the debate on GM food. Adequate testing, sound scientific conclusions and an understanding of the effects of GM food on people were still lacking, he said.

"Since the science is still clouded with such deep uncertainty, that means deferring decisions till the science is clear and reliable, not rushing to desired conclusions which cannot be scientifically supported," Michael Meacher said.

Meacher said the Royal Society, the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council had all raised concerns about the possible health implications of GM food.

He told the newspaper the only human GM trial commissioned by the Food Standards Agency found genetically modified DNA did transfer to bacteria in the human gut. Many scientists had denied this was possible. "But instead of this finding being regarded as a serious discovery which should be checked and rechecked the spin was this was nothing new and did not involve any health risk," he said.

Some substances produced by GM technology had already been found to cause allergic reactions, he said. There were concerns the development of GM crops highly resistant to weed killers meant consumers were being exposed to increasingly toxic residues, some of which could damage embryos in the womb.

Michael Meacher said although it was claimed GM products were rigorously tested, in fact it only amounted to considering whether a crop was similar in composition to a non-GM crop. "This is justified under the rubric of 'substantial equivalence', which was originally a marketing term, and is scientifically vacuous," he said. "It wholly misses the point that health concerns are focused, not on known compounds, but on the effects of the GM technology which are unpredictable."

He said it was "really extraordinary" there had so far been virtually no independent studies of the health effects of GM. It was essential such testing was done before products from GM crops were allowed to go on sale.

Michael Meacher has pledged to continue to campaign on environmental issues now he is out of government. Mr Meacher's office said he had no plans to respond to the criticisms. He has been appointed chairman of Catalyst, a left-wing think-tank that has been critical of the government.

By Vandana Shiva, ZNet Commentary, June 24, 2003

Monsanto through the US government, is trying desperately to reverse its failing fortunes by creating markets for its genetically engineered crops (GMOs) through coercion and corruption.

The EU has not yet cleared GM crops for commercial planting or GM food for imports. Brazil has had a ban on GM crops. And India has not cleared GM food crops and has stopped the spread of genetically engineered Bt. Cotton to Northern India after its dismal performance in Southern India in the first season of commercial planting in 2002.

EU, Brazil and India are all under attack overtly and covertly, for not rushing into adopting genetically engineered crops without caution and ensuring biosafety.

The US has threatened to initiate a dispute against the EU in the WTO for not importing genetically modified foods. The US trade representative, Mr. Zoellick was in Brazil at the end of May to force Brazil to remove the ban on GM crops. The US Secretary of State tried to bully Southern African countries to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg to accept GM food and, but Zambia refused to be bullied.

In India, the US Embassy tried to pressurise the Ministry of Environment through the Prime Minister's office to clear imports of GM corn, but a major mobilisation of women's groups organised as the National Alliance of Women for Food Rights under the movement of Diverse Women for Diversity, was successful in sending back two ship loads of 10,000 tons of GM corn. Since then the Chairman of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee which rejected GM crops and imports has been removed and the Agricultural Ministry has been changed.

Free people with free information are saying no to genetically engineered food for both ecological and health reasons. However, genetic engineering is being imposed on the world by a handful of global corporations with the backing of one powerful government.

Commercial crops produced through genetic engineering are not producing more food nor are they reducing the use of chemicals. While the hunger argument is the most frequently used argument to promote and push genetic engineering, GMOs have more to do with corporate hunger for profits than poor people's hunger for food. As a news item in the international Herald Tribune of May 29, 2003 titled, "Biotech war recast as hunger issue" reported,

President George W. Bush is framing his attack on European resistance to genetically modified crops as part of a campaign against world hunger.

Bush and his aides are making an emotional plea, saying the administration's stance is part of the fight against world hunger. In a speech last week be accused Europe of hindering the "great cause of ending hunger in Africa" with its ban genetically modified corps." (IHT, May 29, 2003)

The technology of genetic engineering is not about overcoming food scarcity but about creating monopolies over food and seed, the first link in the chain and over life itself.

After having pressurised Lula's government in Brazil to temporarily remove the ban on GMOs, Monsanto is now claiming royalties for genes in the Round up Resistance Soya crops, showing once again that profits through royalty collection are the real objective of spreading GM crops.

India has been forced to change its patent laws under TRIPS and the main beneficiary of the Second Amendment to India's Patent Act of 1970 are biotech corporations like Monsanto, seeking patents on genetically engineered crops.

Patents also criminalise and make illegal the human work of life's reproduction. When seeds are patented, farmers exercising their freedom and performing their duty of saving and exchanging seeds are treated as "intellectual property thieves". This can reach absurd limits as in the case of Percy Schmieser whose canola field was polluted by Monsanto's Round up Resistant Canola, and instead of Monsanto compensating Percy for pollution on the "polluter pays principle", Monsanto sued him for $200,000 for theft of their genes. Monsanto uses detective agencies and police to track farmers and their crops. Patents imply police states.

Genetic engineering is not merely causing genetic pollution of biodiversity and creating bio-imperialism, monopolies over life itself. It is also causing knowledge pollution – by undermining independent science, and promoting pseudo science. It is leading to monopolies over knowledge and information.

The victimisation of Dr. Arpad Putzai who showed the health risks of GM potatoes and Dr. Ignacio Chapela who showed that corn had been contaminated in its centre of diversity in Mexico are examples of the intolerance of a corporate controlled scientific system for real science.

The fabrication of the data by Monsanto on Bt. Cotton India is an example of the promotion of an unnecessary, untested, hazardous technology through pseudo science. While yields of GM cotton fell by 80% and farmers had losses of nearly Rs. 6,000/acre. Monsanto used Martin Qaim (University of Bonn) and David Zilberman) University of California, Berkeley) to publish an article in Science to claim that yields of Bt. Cotton increased by 80%. Qaim and Zilberman published the paper on the basis of data provided by Monsanto from Monsanto's trials not on the basis of the harvest from farmers’ fields in the first year of commercial planting.

The fabricated data that presents a failure of Bt. Cotton as a miracle hides the fact that non-target insects and diseases increased 250-300%, costs of seed were 300% more and quantity and quality of cotton was low. This is why on April 25, 2003, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) of the Government of India did not give clearance to Monsanto to sell Bt. Cotton seeds in Northern India.

The false claims of Monsanto were also proved with a total failure of Hybrid maize in the state of Bihar and a black listing of the company by the government.

In Rajasthan, Monsanto gave itself an award for miracle yields. While the brochures claimed 50-90 Q/acre, farmers harvested only 7 Q/acre, 90% lower than the promise. Farmers of the Udaipur district of Rajasthan have started a campaign to boycott Monsanto seeds.

Reports of these failures do not reach the international level because Monsanto controls the media with its public relations spin, just as it is attempting to control governments and science.

Our crops are being polluted, our food contaminated, our scientific research and regulatory agencies threatened and corrupted.

This is the context in which the Biotech Conference for Agriculture Ministers in Sacramento, California, hosted by Ann Vanneman, the US Secretary for Agriculture is taking place. Ann Vanneman used to head Agracetus, a subsidiary of Monsanto. The Brazilian Agriculture Ministry is held captive by Monsanto. The removal of India's Agriculture Minister, Ajit Singh, a few months before general elections is to ensure that the threat to peasant survival under corporate control of agriculture is not put high on the agenda and India's Agriculture Ministry also comes under Monsanto/Cargill control. The first activity in which the new Agriculture Minister Rajnath Singh participated was a Global Seed Conference organised by the Biotech industry.

Sustainability and science are being sacrificed for a reckless experiment with our biodiversity and food systems which is pushing species and peasants to extinction. We need to re-imbed technology in ecology and ethics to ensure that the full ecological and social costs are taken into account.

What is at stake is the evolution of nature and survival of people, our food sovereignty and food freedom, integrity of creation and our food systems based on the evolutionary freedom of nature and democratic freedoms of farmers and consumers. The choice before us is bio-imperialism or bio-democracy. Will a few corporations have a dictatorship over our governments, our knowledge and information, our lives and all life on the planet or will we as members of the Earth family liberate ourselves and all species from the prison of patents and genetic engineering?

We need to reclaim our food freedom and food sovereignty.

Our movement in India seeks to defend our seed freedom (Bija Swaraj) and food freedom (Anna Swaraj) by defending our rights, and refusing to cooperate with immoral and unjust laws (Bija Satyagraha). We save and share our seeds, we boycott corporate seeds, we are creating patent free, chemical free, genetic engineering free zones of agriculture to ensure our agriculture is free of corporate monopolies and chemical and genetic pollution.

Our bread is our freedom. Our freedom will ensure our bread. And each of us has a duty to exercise bread freedom (Anna Swaraj) – for the sake of the earth, for all species, and for ourselves and the generations to come.

Ehsan Masood, 17 June 2003, Source: SciDev.Net

A new international law covering the conditions under which genetically modified (GM) organisms can be traded between countries is to come into force later this year, after the Pacific island of Palau last week became the 50^th state to ratify the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.

Palau's move triggered a 90-day countdown before the protocol – which will regulate the impact on the environment and human health from trade in GM organisms – comes into legal force on 11 September.

Under the protocol, anyone exporting GM organisms, such as plants or fish, that are intended for release into the environment will need prior permission from the importing country. Permission will not be needed to export GM organisms intended for use directly as food for human consumption, as animal feed or in food processing.

The protocol lets countries refuse GM imports if these are forbidden under national laws – even if there is insufficient scientific information on the health and environmental impacts of GM organisms concerned to indicate that they are unsafe.

Similarly, GM imports can be refused under the protocol if there is a risk that an import would threaten local employment and businesses. And the protocol requires all GM organisms intended for human food, animal feed or food processing to be labelled before 2006.

"The Cartagena protocol recognises that biotechnology has an immense potential for improving human welfare, but that it could also pose potential risks to biodiversity and human health," says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme.

"This new regime promises to make the international trade in GM organisms more transparent, while introducing important safety measures that will meet the needs of consumers, industry and the environment for many decades to come."

Many developing countries, member states of the European Union and environment and development organisations have welcomed the news of protocol’s imminent entry into force, arguing that the new law will be a forceful counterweight to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the body that sets global trade rules.

"Trade cannot be above safety," says Tewolde Egziabher, general manager of the Environmental Protection Authority of Ethiopia, who led the developing-country group during five years of negotiations on the protocol. "At least those countries that ratified it should view trade rules [of the WTO] and the Biosafety Protocol equally," he added.

But the protocol’s relationship with WTO rules remains deeply controversial. During negotiations, the large grain-exporting countries – Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada and the US – successfully introduced language into the text specifying that the protocol will not affect a country’s rights and obligations under existing international agreements. Developing countries, however, inserted separate language saying that the protocol will not be "subordinate to other international agreements."

The protocol is part of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a global agreement to conserve the world’s dwindling biodiversity that was signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. It covers organisms intended for use in a laboratory, in agriculture, fisheries, animal feed, and processed food. GM organisms used in the production of medicines for human use are exempt from the protocol.

The countries that have ratified the protocol will meet in Malaysia early next year to begin discussions on a common system for labelling GM foods. The Malaysia meeting will also address the protocol’s provision for compensation in the event of accidents during international transport of GM organisms. This must be agreed before 2008.

"The government says that it wants a ‘great debate’ about GM - we must call its bluff"

George Monbiot, Tuesday June 10, 2003, The Guardian

Something about the launch of the government's "great GM debate" last week rang a bell. It was, perhaps, the contrast between the ambition of its stated aims and the feebleness of their execution. Though the environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, claims she wants "to ensure all voices are heard", she has set aside an advertising budget of precisely zero. Public discussions will take place in just six towns.

Then I got it. Five years ago, Monsanto, the world's most controversial biotechnology company, did the same thing. In June 1998, after its attempts to persuade consumers that they wanted to eat genetically modified food had failed, it launched what it called a public debate "to encourage a positive understanding of food biotechnology". As the company's GM investments were then valued at $96bn (£60bn), the proposition that it might desist if the response was unfavourable seemed unlikely.

To Monsanto's horror, it got the debate it said it wanted. A few days after it launched its new policy, Prince Charles wrote an article for the Telegraph. His argument, as always, was cack-handed and contradictory, but it shoved genetic engineering to the top of the news agenda. Monsanto's share value slumped. Within two years it had been taken over by Pharmacia, a company it once dwarfed.

Like Monsanto, the British government has already invested in genetic engineering. In 1999, it allocated £13m (or 26 times what it is spending on the great debate) "to improve the profile of the biotech industry", by promoting "the financial and environmental benefits of biotechnology". This, and its appointment of major biotech investors to head several research committees and a government department, ensured that it lost the confidence of the public. So, like Monsanto, it now seeks to revive that confidence, by claiming - rather too late - that it is open to persuasion. Again, the decision to introduce the crops to Britain appears to have been made long before the debate began.

Last year, an unnamed minister told the Financial Times that the debate was simply a "PR offensive". "They're calling it a consultation," he said, "but don't be in any doubt, the decision is already taken." In March, Margaret Beckett began the licensing process for 18 applications to grow or import commercial quantities of GM crops in Britain. Her action pre-empts the debate, pre-empts the field trials designed to determine whether or not the crops are safe to grow here, and pre-empts the only real decisions which count: namely those made by the EU and the World Trade Organisation. The WTO must now respond to an official US complaint about Europe's refusal to buy GM food. If the US wins, we must either pay hundreds of millions of dollars of annual compensation, or permit GM crops to be grown and marketed here.

Why should this prospect concern us? I might have hoped that, five years after the first, real debate began in Britain, it would not be necessary to answer that question. But so much misinformation has been published over the past few weeks that it seems I may have to start from the beginning.

The principal issue, perpetually and deliberately ignored by government, many scientists, most of the media and, needless to say, the questionnaire being used to test public opinion, is the corporate takeover of the food chain. By patenting transferred genes and the technology associated with them, then buying up the competing seed merchants and seed-breeding centres, the biotech companies can exert control over the crops at every stage of production and sale. Farmers are reduced to their sub-contracted agents. This has devastating implications for food security in the poor world: food is removed from local marketing networks - and therefore the mouths of local people - and gravitates instead towards sources of hard currency. This problem is compounded by the fact that (and this is another perpetually neglected issue) most of the acreage of GM crops is devoted to producing not food for humans, but feed for animals.

The second issue is environmental damage. Many of the crops have been engineered to withstand applications of weedkiller. This permits farmers to wipe out almost every competing species of plant in their fields. The exceptions are the weeds which, as a result of GM pollen contamination, have acquired multiple herbicide resistance. In Canada, for example, some oilseed rape is now resistant to all three of the most widely used modern pesticides. The result is that farmers trying to grow other crops must now spray it with 2,4-D, a poison which persists in the environment.

The third issue, greatly over-emphasised by the press, is human health. There is, as yet, no evidence of adverse health effects caused directly by GM crops. This could be because there are no effects, or it could be because the necessary clinical trials and epidemiological studies, have, extraordinarily, still to be conducted.

There is, however, some evidence of possible indirect effects. In 1997 the Conservative government quietly raised the permitted levels of glyphosate in soya beans destined for human consumption by 20,000%. Glyphosate is the active ingredient of Roundup, the pesticide which Monsanto's soya beans have been engineered to resist. "Roundup Ready" GM crops, because they are sprayed directly with the herbicide, are likely to contain far higher levels of glyphosate than conventional ones. In 1999, the Journal of the American Cancer Society reported that exposure to glyphosate led to increased risks of contracting a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

The defenders of GM crops say we can avoid all such hazards by choosing not to eat them. The problem is that we can avoid them only if we know whether or not the food we eat contains them. The US appears determined to attack the strict labelling requirements for which the European parliament has now voted. If it succeeds in persuading the WTO that accurate labelling is an unfair restriction, then the only means we have of avoiding GM is to eat organic, whose certification boards ensure that it is GM-free. But as pollen from GM crops contaminates organic crops, the distinction will eventually become impossible to sustain. While banning GM products might at first appear to be a restriction of consumer choice (someone, somewhere, might want to eat one), not banning them turns out to be a far greater intrusion upon our liberties.

The only chance we have of keeping them out of Europe is to ensure that the political cost becomes greater than the economic cost: to demand, in other words, that our governments fight the US through the WTO and, if they lose, pay compensation rather than permit them to be planted. So let us join this debate, and see how much the government likes it when "all voices are heard". Like Monsanto, it may come to wish it had never asked.

The official website for the Genetic Modification (GM) public debate taking place in June 2003 is http://www.gmnation.org.uk. Send your views about GM through this website until 18 July 2003.

The public consultation process has started with a poorly publicised meeting in Birmingham, followed by meetings in Swansea, Taunton, Belfast, Glasgow and Harrogate. Already in the national media questions are being asked about the sincerity of this process.

A Cambridge County Council, Cambridge City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council Meeting is to take place on 7 July, 7.30pm at the University Arms Hotel, Cambridge, chaired by Professor Malcolm Grant. Booking is essential and only open to residents of Cambridgeshire - 01480 373898.