As a result of a Friends of the Earth (FoE) legal challenge, recently planted, genetically-modified (GM) crop trials in Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire have been exposed as illegal. Michael Meacher, Environment Minister, acknowledged the illegality as ‘only a technicality’ with ‘no health, safety or environmental issues involved’. This is consistent with the government’s gung-ho attitude to GM foods and the profits its agri-business bedfellows will reap if they are given the go-ahead for full-scale production. Meanwhile, however, across the globe the resistance to GM foods is mushrooming as consumers and growers are leading the way.
In September, the FoE legal action exposed the fact that AgrEvo UK Ltd had been allowed to substantially revise its plans for planting trial crops of oilseed rape, including quadrupling the area of land, doubling the length of the trial to 12 months and changing the time of planting from spring to autumn, without making a fresh application for permission to carry out the tests. Clearly AgrEvo viewed the permission it had from the Department of the Environment as the go-ahead to do whatever it wanted. Michael Meacher’s response has confirmed this and his admission that these trials were illegal was carefully timed so that the crops had already been planted.
The trials are supposed to be carefully controlled and monitored. The truth is the opposite: there are very few checks on the trials; the safeguards to prevent cross-pollination and spread into the wider environment are minimal; and the legal sanctions, when the rules are breached, are pitiful. Nonetheless the government is promoting GM foods as safe in advance and its opponents are branded as Luddite — opposed on principle to scientific advance. Next year the crop trials will expand dramatically and, in the face of crop destruction by environmental activists, the government is considering keeping the trial sites secret.
Prime Minister Tony Blair wants us all to keep ‘an open mind’ until the trials are over. Central to the government’s arguments against GM opponents, and more specifically against the destruction of crops, is that the trials should go ahead in everyone’s interests as they will resolve the question of whether GM foods are safe. This argument is fallacious. The trials will not answer the question of safety: there will be no account of cumulative or long-term effects; no account of interaction with other environmental factors; no account of widescale environmental impacts on wildlife, like birds for example, which range beyond the test areas.
Science is less the arbiter of truth and virtue than the government would have us believe. It is just as much driven by the profit motive in capitalist society as any other area of human activity. Who pays the scientists and funds their research is a crucial question. The chemical multinationals, not least of all Monsanto, have been responsible for major hazards released into the environment — agent orange, dioxins, organophosphates, to name but a few — all declared safe for use and thoroughly tested at the time.
The test of safety for GM foods must be social as well as scientific. Above all, if it is a risk to tamper with foods in this way, what are the advantages and disadvantages? Much has been said about combatting hunger in the Third World, reducing pesticide and herbicide use and maximising yield, yet the answers to these problems already exist without genetic modification. Organically produced foods do not require pesticides and herbicides, and locally developed seeds and farm management alongside the removal of debt will be much more effective in combatting hunger across the world. These solutions, however, do not have the advantage of providing superprofits for the chemical and agri-business multinationals.
In response to this attempt to corner the world market in food, a multi-billion dollar anti-trust action is being launched in 30 countries against agribusiness multinationals such as Monsanto, DuPont and Novartis. The action is being brought jointly by the Foundation on Economic Trends, National Family Farm Coalition, both in the USA, and individual farmers across Latin America, Asia, Europe and North America. The action is a response to the fact that these multinational corporations are cornering the market in seeds and crops, tying farmers to using particular herbicides and pesticides and policing seed production through terminator technology. At the moment, 80 per cent of Third World farmers rely on saving or exchanging their own seed. Ten companies already own 30 per cent of the $23bn annual commercial seed trade, and five of them (Monsanto, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Aventis and Du Pont) control virtually all GM crops.
Across the world consumers and growers are rebelling against this attempt to monopolise food production for profit at the expense of local producers and the environment. In France a farmer, leader of the radical environmental group Confédération Paysanne, was gaoled for burning effigies of Ronald McDonald in the streets in protest against US sanctions on French foods following the EU-ban on hormone-treated beef and for destroying a store of Novartis GM maize. When he was released on bail, crowds of supporters welcomed him outside the gaol. In Denmark a group called Green Guerilla uprooted GM crops and in Germany ‘crop squats’ are being held on test sites. In Ireland, the ‘Faery Army’ destroyed a test site for Monsanto’s RoundUp-Ready sugar beet in Cork and another group has begun a legal challenge to the trials. Even in the USA, the anti-Frankenstein food movement is growing. In Minnesota a group called ‘Bolt Wevils’ has destroyed Novartis research fields and glued the doors of the company’s headquarters shut. They are targeting university campuses where Monsanto and Novartis are funding research. According to Time magazine 81 per cent of US citizens want GM food labelling and 60 per cent would not buy food labelled as containing GM ingredients. The US’s leading grain exporter has advised farmers to segregate GM crops from conventional ones in future, and the American Corn Growers’ Association is advising its members to stop growing GM corn because of consumer concerns. The cost of segregating crops will be enormous and the costs will fall on individual farmers rather than the multinationals.
It is estimated that so far this year 50 field-scale trials and several farm-scale trials have been wrecked by activists in the UK. Major food chains like McDonalds and Burger King have removed GM ingredients from their food and the supermarkets are squabbling about who was first to remove GM ingredients from their own-label foods. New labelling rules mean that catering establishments now have to advise customers if they are using GM ingredients — although not GM derivatives such as soya oil and lecithin.
Earlier this year Novartis axed 1,100 jobs following a drop in sales, and is set to downscale further in the face of a 25% drop in sales. AstraZeneca in Britain is considering selling its agrichemical business and Monsanto’s share price has fallen from $62 to $40 in the last year. Novartis’s agribusiness chief Heinz Imhof has called for the setting up of a European equivalent to the US Food and Drugs Agency (FDA) to reassure consumers that GM foods are safe. This would suit the multinationals down to the ground if they could ensure such an agency would act as its poodle in the same way as the FDA. In Britain, of course, they don’t need to go that far — they have the Labour government.
