Posted on 16-6-2003

Let's Do A Monsanto
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.