Lifting the curtain on power as Monsanto corners God
Roundup ready crops, Suicide genes, terminator seeds, hormone-flavoured
milk and meat - the bio-tech revolution is upon us.
`Render under Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things
that are God's.'
You might not be very keen on doing either, but when it comes to
agriculture, or just plain eating, you might have no choice. Monsanto,
which in the past contributed Agent Orange, dioxins and PCBs to humanity,
has now made some further modifications of `God's works', which, if let,
will give the company a patent on the crops upon which the world depends
for its food.
The `debate' about GM food is the struggle to determine whether Monsanto
will be let corner the food market.
Tying seeds and farmers to proprietary chemicals
Monsanto has produced a `super' weedkiller called Roundup. Roundup
(glyphosate herbicide) is so effective it kills every weed and saves hours
of labour putting out herbicides. Monsanto then modified the seed, like
soya, so it was strong enough to resist `Roundup'. Now farmers can spew
`Roundup' all around with impunity, the soya survives.
d if you want `Roundup-ready soya' you have to enter into a contract with
Monsanto promising, on pain of huge penalties, never to save or replant it,
and to use Monsanto's Roundup.
A Kentucky farmer, D. Chaney, one of 1,000 so far prosecuted for breaking
contract, settled for a mere $35,000 damages to Monsanto. Herbicides are
big business. U.S. farmers spend $4.3 billion annually controlling weeds.
Roundup is a nice little earner.
`Roundup', which is already on the shelves in Ireland, causes nausea, skin
and eye inflammation, bronchial constriction and nervous system disorders.
(One in three of children here now have asthma. Nobody can work out why. -
The Lancet)
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The `debate' about GM food is the struggle to determine whether Monsanto
will be let corner the food market.
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Suicide genes
Not content with this `sledge-hammer' herbicide, which farmers can get
hooked on, Monsanto has recently produced seeds which include a suicide
gene. It means that instead of plants reproducing themselves, they are
programmed, by interfering with their DNA, not to have seed which
germinates. That keeps farmers going back to Monsanto every year for their
new seed. They are called `Terminator' seeds. It is reported they'll be on
stream in five years. At present, 80% of crops grown in the Third World
are grown from farm-saved seeds. With the new seed, the farmers will have
to come back every year for more.
With suicide genes, and Roundup contracts, Monsanto has a patent ad
futurum. God didn't even have that. Monsanto boasts that U.S. soya
production in the year 2000 will be 100% genetically modified. That is 60
million acres, in the US alone.
Cotton is a special case again. Monsanto bought up Calgene, which had
modified cotton genes to withstand a good dose of a herbicide,
BXN(Bromoxynil) which happens to be recognised by the U.S. EPA as a cause
of cancer and birth defects, including water on the brain (hydrocephaly)
and spine and skull defects. Rabbits developed all these `defects' when
they were fed BXN.
Now humans mignt not directly eat cotton plants, but they do eat meat, and
BXN is fat soluble and accumulates in the meat of animals which eat cotton
plant as silage in the states.
Local authorities across the state have final authority over planning
decisions, but have not used their powers to stop GM, still less to ensure
the preservation of Ireland's trading image as `green safe food', which
might yet ensure the continuation of Irish agricultural production and
trade in a world where Ireland cannot compete with world prices of the U.S.
and Oceania.
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Testing times
Independent testing of Monsanto's new products is both rare and hazardous.
Most often, test results have emerged from Monsanto's own 150 labs at base
camp, St, Louis, Missouri, and have been readily accepted by the U.S. EPA
and the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration, as proving crops to be quite
safe. A potato is still after all a potato, and we've eaten them for
years. That's what Monsanto said anyway.
Recently Dr. Pusztai, at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, researched
Monsanto's genetically modified potato by feeding it to rats. He found that
the spud weakened the rats' immune system and damaged vital body organs,
heart, liver, brain and stomach.
Dr. Pusztai, who is 68, went on Granada TV with the Institute's permission,
to talk about his results. He was promptly suspended and then sacked from
his job. The Rowlett Research Institute recently received a donation of
£140,000 from Monsanto.
A group of 20 scientists, in an unprecedented move, supported his findings
called for his reinstatement. They also called for funding for extensive
research into Dr. Pusztai's results, which investigated the effects of
Lectin in the GM potato. Lectin has also been introduced into a range of
modified foods, including maize.
Roundup Ready Soya is everywhere
You perhaps don't think that people eat much soya. You'd be wrong. Soya is
in 60% of all processed food sold in Britain, from bread, beer, biscuits,
baby food, and so on. 80% of U.S. vegetable oils come from soy beans.
You're talking genetically engineered crop products in crisps, salad
dressings, chocolate, burgers, margarine, biscuits, infant formulas, oils,
chips, and, wait for it, MacDonalds french fries (which spends a phenomenal
$2 billion a year on its advertising.) In all, 30,000 items in U.S. grocery
stores contain genetically modified ingredients.
d that is where GM labelling comes in. Without labelling GM products,
nobody knows what they are consuming, and the damage to health, perhaps 5
or 10 years down the road, can never be established. The U.S. Government
FDA does not consider labelling is necessary, thanks to strong bipartisan
lobbying by Monsanto. After all, why would you need to label a potato, asks
Monsanto. It's a potato.
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The battle over EU bans on rBGH beef, or GM foods is one between immensely
powerful corporations looking to control the food market and the staple
crops which feed the world. It's not so much Frankenstein seeds, but
Frankenstein on the board of directors.
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On/off germination genes
But hot on the heels of `terminator' genes, are `verminator' genes, which
link the plant's ability to germinate, or grow at all, to the application
of proprietary chemicals. If you switch off germination at end of season,
the farmer has to come back for more seed. That means Monsanto has to keep
producing seed. But with verminator genes, the farmer only has to buy a
chemical to switch germination on again. That is cheaper for Monsanto. And
you have to buy it. RAFI (Rural Advancement Foundation International) calls
them junkie seeds - like Lazarus they rise again, under the blessed
chemical from Monsanto. Novartis (the Swiss owned conglomerate of Sandoz
asnd Ciba-Geigy) has even gone so far as to genetically engineer switching
off the plants' natural resistance to infections. (The SAR system) Only a
proprietary Novartis-produced chemical can then switch them on again.
Persuading the Persuaders
How did Monsanto get away with it? Last year Monsanto made a gross profit
of $5 billion on gross revenue of $8.6 billion. Not only have they
contributed to the election campaigns of Clinton and Blair, they have also
been walking in and out of the `open door' at the White House with
judicious selection of Congressmen and government advisers to take into
their pay - a place on the board earns them $100,000 per annum.
article in Chicago's `In These Times' gives a wide list of Monsanto
lobbyists who are drawn from the ranks of Congressmen, Government and past
and present presidential aides. Monsanto's public relations chief, Virginia
Weldon, is a member of Clinton's Committee of Scientific Advisors and
Gore's Sustainable Development Roundtable; Mickey Kantor, a former
Secretary of Commerce, and adviser to Clinton, has joined William
Ruckleshaus, a former director of the U.S. EPA, on the Monsanto Board. The
same article refers to top Clinton aides, including Madeleine Albright, Dan
Glickman, Secretary of Agriculture, and William Daley, Secretary of
Commerce, lobbying EU counterparts on Monsanto's behalf, and mentions
Bertie Ahern and Lionel Jospin as objects of their attentions. Monsanto's
CEO Shapiro has been named by Clinton as a ``special trade representative.''
Could it be that their attention to Bertie Ahern caused his swift, if not
unique U-turn, (remember PfP) when Ahern forgot his last election
undertaking of total opposition to genetically modified foodstuffs and
trials thereof - which have since been conducted on Teagasc (state Research
and Development company for Agriculture) land at Oakpark, Carlow.
The crop was destroyed by opponents of GM. ``What else was open to them?''
says Dublin European election candidate Seán Crowe, who has voiced concerns
over GM foods encroaching into Ireland.
The EPA first granted Monsanto a licence to grow Roundup ready sugar beet,
on Teagasc land in County Carlow. Genetic Concern tried every avenue to
contest the licence. In the end, Clare Watson took a case by way of
judicial review, and lost. Monsanto insisted to the judge that she should
bear costs, estimated to run to £400,000.
It is a practice well known to corporations in the States - it's called
slapps, where a sharp and high cost reminder is delivered to protestors to
shut them up. Genetic Concern has not shut up.
This year, although the Dublin Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey,
talked of his interest in a GM crop moratorium, Monsanto is going ahead
this year with `trials' all over the place, in Cork, in Tipperary, in
Meath, Wexford, Kildare and Carlow and Dempsey has set up an `exploratory
debate' which started last week.
Meanwhile the CEO of the Food and Safety Authority of Ireland, Patrick
Wall, gave as its considered opinion 2 weeks that GM food ``was quite safe'',
and Dr. Fenton Howell, of no less a body than the Irish Medical
Organisation, said he thought that this opinion was ``welcome and sensible''.
Minister Dempsey thinks that a general moratorium on GM food would be
illegal under the EU regulations. He might have considered other EU
countries, like Greece, which placed a moratorium on all GM crop tests;
Austria and Luxembourg, which have GM food bans; France and Denmark, which
have restrictions. In Britain, where Blair is `gung ho' for GM, the British
Medical Association, representing 15,000 doctors, called for a moratorium
on all GM crop planting, and the Local Government Association in Britain
has supported a 5-year freeze on `Frankenstein Foods', which gives children
in school and people in care the right to a GM-free diet.
Sinn Féin Councillor Cionnaith O Súilleabháin, from Clonakilty, in Cork,
initiated just such a lead to Irish councils in a resolution he put to
Clonakilty UDC last February, calling for an end to planting GM crops and
the labelling of GM food and support for other EU states which are
resisting the bureaucrats in Brussels.
The craven attitude taken by Ahern's government, a stance mirrored within
the establishment parties, means that local authorities have not taken up
Cionnaith's challenge. Local authorities across the state have final
authority over planning decisions, but have not used their powers to stop
GM, still less to ensure the preservation of Ireland's trading image as
`green safe food', which might yet ensure the continuation of Irish
agricultural production and trade in a world where Ireland cannot compete
with world prices of the U.S. and Oceania.
Hormone stuffed beef
Two weeks ago a showdown was billed between EU Commissioner Franz Fischler
and U.S. Agriculture Secretary, Dan Glickman, over whether the EU would
allow imports of hormone-treated meat, rBGH, which the World Trade
Organisation has declared cannot be banned. Hormone-treated beef has been
banned for ten years in the EU.
Cattle are treated with growth promoting hormones which include doses of
testosterone, progesterone and worst, oestradiol 17 beta. (The latter 2
hormones compose the contraceptive pill, the former is a male sex hormone).
The hormones accumulate in milk and the meat. Just this month, the EU
veterinary committee announced that it had uncovered new evidence that
oestradiol 17 beta has both tumour-initiating and tumour-promoting effects.
Oestradiol, as far back as the 1950s, was known to have been a cause of
vaginal cancers in women and cancers in their offspring. In Italy, babies
fed on hormone treated cattle products developed breasts. A picture of a
baby's head on a female body on the front of Der Spiegel damned the product
in Europe, yet its use has been cleared by such organisations as the U.S.
FDA, the World Health Organisation and the UN FAO. Monsanto hopes to get
the ban lifted at the WHO conference in Rome this summer.
Trade War over GM and BGH
The U.S., which has been selling 30,000 tonnes of supposedly `hormone-free'
beef to the EU annually, was caught out two weeks ago, when growth
promoters were discovered in supposedly hormone-free beef. Attitudes have
hardened and the EU, according to EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz
Fischler, has no intention of revoking the ban. The World Trade
Organisation has adjudicated the EU ban to be illegal.
So the U.S. has retaliated by threatening a trade war and has drawn up a
hit list of mainly agricultural products worth $900 million, upon which the
U.S. threatened 100% tariffs unless the beef ban was withdrawn by 13 May.
It wasn't. The U.S. hit list affects only some £10 million of Irish exports
to the US, mostly pigmeat.
The battle over EU bans on rBGH beef, or GM foods is one between immensely
powerful corporations looking to control the food market and the staple
crops which feed the world. It's not so much Frankenstein seeds, but
Frankenstein on the board of directors. The ban on beef using hormone
growth promoters, as the dispute over genetically modified crops, is one
important way for the EU to protect its farmers the hand of Monsanto
cornering God and the food market, but also the US taking over our food
markets.
In April this year, seven of the largest grocery chains in Europe
went GM free: Tesco, Safeway, Sainsbury's, Iceland, Marks and Spencer, the
Co-op and Waitrose are all looking for products which are 100% free of GM
organisms. Then Unilever, which had been an aggressive supporter of GM,
threw in the towel, then Nestlé, and the next day, Cadbury Schweppes all
joined the GM-free European consortium. Dunnes Stores is still assessing
its position.
At the end of the day, it's not a scientific analysis which will determine
the outcome, but a power play for control of markets - for who is going to
be let to corner the food market. It just so happens that it is also our
survival, and that of the animals and their furry friends, the
caterpillers, that are at stake too.
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