November 1999
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Biotechnology = Hunger

November 8
Turning Point Project full-page advertisement in New York Times

The biotechnology industry promotes itself as the solution to world hunger. In reality, the industry's practices may drive self-sufficient farmers off their land and undermine their food security - increasing poverty and hunger.

The biotechnology industry claims it holds the answer to world hunger: high technology to increase production. But according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this badly misstates the problem. There is no shortage of food in the world. Per capita food production has never been higher. 

The real problem is this: In a globalized economy, the poorest countries of the world are exporting their food to the already well-fed countries. 

Global agribusiness corporations, including those involved in biotechnology, are helping to dispossess millions of small, self-sufficient farmers who once sustained their families and communities. The best lands have been converted to grow luxury crops for the global market: potted plants, flowers, beef, cotton, soya, and exotic fruits and vegetables. Global corporations rarely grow inexpensive staple foods for local people and communities.

Left without their own land to grow food, without jobs on high-tech farms (that emphasize technology rather than workers), and with no cash to buy food, the former self-sufficient farmers now swell the ranks of the world's 800 million hungry.

The issues are not merely about technology. The issues are: 

• Who has access to land?
• Who grows the food?
• What food do they grow?
• To be consumed by whom?

In a globalized economy, food self-sufficiency is replaced by food dependency.

Is biotechnology the answer?

No, it's part of the problem.

Here are four reasons why:

I. Biotechnology threatens farmers

Much of the world's remaining biodiversity now exists in the forests and fields of the southern, poor nations. It's here that small farmers have, for millennia, been cultivating, saving and refining seeds to better feed their communities. 

But now, global biotechnology companies are on frenzied searches for seeds that they can patent and monopolize. They make small genetic alterations in the seeds, calling those "inventions" to gain the patents. In the U.S., for example, it is now illegal for farmers to save patented seeds without permission or payment of royalties. 

Corporate ownership of seeds can make it very expensive for poor farmers to survive; millions may soon have to give up their lands, move to cities, seek urban jobs, and join the hunger lines. In 1997, a million such small farmers in India took to the streets to protest seed patenting. They called it "biopiracy." All over the world (including India and England), protesters have ripped up biotech crops.

Corporate scientists are also working toward the day when food won't be grown in fields by farmers at all. In the high tech, biotech future, your broccoli may be grown indoors, from tissue cultures. The companies will no longer worry about weather or nature (or protesters); they will have total control. Real farmers may become obsolete.

II. Biotech suicide plants

If anyone still believes that the biotechnology industry is motivated by a desire to feed a hungry world, consider the new "terminator" technology being developed by several companies and the U.S. government. This is a plant that's genetically engineered to produce a sterile seed. A "suicide plant."

 Why would they want to create such a thing? Here's why.

For millennia, small farmers have cut costs and bred for local conditions by saving seeds for later replanting. "Terminator" seeds will make that impossible. Small farmers will have to buy new seeds annually from biotech companies. The cost could drive many out of business.

III. Vulnerable to failure

For all the billions that have gone into biotechnology, its performance is pathetic. Some biotech crops have been spectacular failures, leading to lawsuits against biotech companies. For example, in 1997, tens of thousands of acres of biotech cotton withered and died. Farmers sued the companies that produced the biotech product, finally settling for up to $5 million. Similar problems have been seen with other biotech products including rBGH, which some dairy farmers inject into their animals to increase the milk supply. 

According to a 1998 report commissioned by Health Canada, cows injected with rBGH showed about a 50% increase in the risk of clinical lameness, a 25% increase in the risk of mastitis, a 40% increase in the risk of infertility, and a 20-25% increase in the risk of being "culled" (slaughtered for under-productivity).

 Several U.S. dairy farmer associations and consumer groups have recently taken action to rescind the FDA's approval of this hormone based on its adverse affects to animal and human health.

Another risk comes from the fact that biotech farming promotes monoculture, a single crop covering many acres. As happened with the infamous Green Revolution's chemical technologies that once promised to "feed the hungry," new chemical dependent biotech monocultures have replaced mixed, rotational cropping which formerly kept the soil healthy. Monocultures are notoriously vulnerable to weather events and to insect blights. Failures can be catastrophic.

IV. Ecological roulette

The biotech industry says it is "ecological" because biotech decreases the need to use chemical sprays. At the same time they make that case, one biotech giant, Monsanto, is marketing the number one chemical herbicide in the world: Roundup. And they are genetically engineering certain crops to resist Roundup. 

It's a pretty slick deal. On the one hand, Monsanto sells the Roundup to farmers to kill weeds. On the other hand, it sells a genetically engineered herbicide resistant crop that Roundup can't kill. As a result, farmers use even more Roundup since the cash crop is protected from it. 

Other biotech companies are doing the same thing with their own herbicide products. Is this what they call ecological agriculture? Are we missing something here?

The true effect is to increase the use of pesticides and thereby increase pollution of the soil, air, water table, rivers and oceans. Pesticides make water undrinkable, kill fish by the millions, and in the long run can turn the soil sterile.

One more point. Genetically engineered crops are difficult to control. They can cross-pollinate with other plants, or migrate, or mutate. If a pest- or herbicide-resistant strain one day spreads from crops to weeds, a super weed could multiply and be nearly impossible to stop, threatening the world food supply. One hundred U.S. scientists took this danger seriously enough to warn that "it could lead to irreversible, devastating damage to the ecology."

Obviously, the biotechnology industry is not trying to feed the hungry.  That's just their advertising theme. They are trying to feed themselves. If the world really wants to feed the hungry, the way to do it is to put farmers back on the land, growing staple crops for themselves, their families and communities, not export crops for wealthy nations. Rather than destroying people's abilities to feed themselves, we should be encouraging it.

If you would like further information on how you can help the many organizations really trying to feed the hungry, and to regulate the behaviors of the biotechnology industry, please contact us at the number below.

• Food First / Institute for Food & Development Policy
• International Center for Technology Assessment
• Organic Consumers Association
• Friends of the Earth
• Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy
• Greenpeace USA
• Humane Society USA
• International Forum on Food and Agriculture
• Pesticide Action Network
• Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation
• Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology
• Sierra Club
• International Forum on Globalization
• Mothers & Others for a Liveable Planet
• Mothers for Natural Law
• Council for Responsible Genetics
• Earth Island Institute
• Food & Water
• Rural Vermont
• Center for Ethics and Toxics
• Center for Food Safety
• Idaho Sporting Congress

Signers are all part of a coalition of more than 60 non-profit organizations that favor democratic, localized, ecologically sound alternatives to current practices and policies. This advertisement is the last in a series on Genetic Engineering. Other ad series discuss the extinction crisis, economic globalization, industrial agriculture and megatechnology. 

For more information, please contact:

:Turning Point Project, 310 D St. NE, Washington, DC 20002

1-800-249-8712 www.turnpoint.org email: info@turnpoint.org

Iceland (British supermarket) boss to freeze out meat reared on GM feed 

November 7
Sunday Mirror (UK)

Iceland boss Malcolm Walker is taking on the High Street giants in a new round of the GM-free food war.

Last week, he banned artificially-coloured eggs from his nationwide chain. Now he plans to remove meat and poultry reared on GM feed. 

The ban, to start in the New Year, will force rival stores to follow suit. Suppliers have warned him the competition think he's "rocking the boat" but he is determined to carry on.

Mr Walker, 53, said: "The food system in Britain is as good as any but we are adding things into it that we don't need."

Speaking from his Cheshire home, he fried two of his own pale-yolked eggs - from chickens not fed with artificial colorants - and explained: "Public awareness about diet and the safety of food has surged. It's the one issue on which Tony Blair seems to have been out of touch with the public. 

"In the last day or so, we have seen how the Government is now having to change its stance on the question of GM. That's due to pressure of public opinion.

"I won't deny it's good marketing to address public concerns but you only succeed if you give people want they want."

Reflecting that, Iceland's share prices have started to lift out of the doldrums they hit four years ago. On Friday, days after his yolk-coloring ban, nearly all 760 shops sold out of eggs.

Iceland was the first to withdraw GM ingredients from own-brand products 18 months ago.

Mr Walker said: "All we are advocating is the removal of additives that are not really necessary."

Battle brews over protecting rights to genetically engineered crops

November 7
Kansas City Star

LUBBOCK, Texas -- At the center of gleaming government laboratories in Lubbock, tucked into petri dishes nurturing man-made sprouts, coursing through roots of genetically engineered seedlings, lives an idea.

The idea came from a problem. Corporations are spending millions to blend genes and make plants impervious to insects and weed spray, plants that already make the cotton in your T-shirt and the sweetener in your soft drink.

Those companies, though, are worried about farmers simply stashing away seed from one year for the next spring's planting.

So the idea is simple enough: Just make sure that a plant will have no offspring. Design the plant for big yields of sterile seeds. 

Suddenly, the know-how tucked in a seed would have hard-wired protection. Farmers would need to buy fresh supplies each year. 

Critics see the idea as a Frankenstein's monster. They warn it could upset thousands of years of agricultural tradition in an arrogant attempt to cage biology's driving force: the need of any organism to reproduce.

But even some scientists, nervous that biotechnology could loose unnatural forces into wild, that gene swapping could create superweeds or corn that kills butterflies, like the idea.

Molecular biologist Mel Oliver hit on the since-patented inspiration several years ago--"It was a scientific brain teaser I couldn't let go"--and now spends much of his time in a government lab trying to reap an infertile harvest.

"I thought about whether this is something we should be doing given that it doesn't add anything to the farmer's crop," said Oliver at the U.S.

Department of Agriculture's lab in Lubbock. "(But) this is the only way I know of to stop the transfer of (genetic engineering) into the environment."

To people like Oliver, the idea--dubbed "Terminator" by its critics and "technology protection system" by its advocates--is a leash on biotechnology.

Today, scientists pluck genes out of organisms--from viruses to bacteria to animals--and insert them into plants to achieve certain traits. That has led to fears, supported by preliminary research, that those artificial gene sequences could blow from the pollen of a genetically modified crop, mate with a wild plant and create a nearly indestructible superweed.

Terminator, many scientists hope, could stop a bacteria combined in the laboratory with a wheat plant from teaming with a wild grass in the field. "Sterility," Oliver said, "is an evolutionary dead-end."

While it may offer protection to the environment--some people aren't so sure--Terminator will be driven by money.

Currently, without Terminator, seed companies find themselves suing American farmers for setting aside part of their harvests to plant the next year.

The biotechnology industry is reluctant to sell genetically altered seed abroad, where custom and unsympathetic legal systems don't favor their efforts to prevent farmers from keeping back some seed.

With Terminator, the biotechnology revolution would be export-ready and pirate-proof. Seed companies could watch the royalties pour in for decades.

Which is why many environmentalists detest it.

"It's really a form of environmental vandalism," said Indiana University biologist Martha Crouch. She worked in the genetic engineering of plants until she was overcome with fears about the technology several years ago.

"The idea that somehow you have the right to break the cycle of life, that goes on from seed to seed from time immemorial, doesn't make sense," Crouch said. "I think it is immoral."

Protectionists in Europe have seized on the perceived dangers of genetically engineered food to keep out tons of American imports. They are joined by environmentalists for whom Terminator sums up all their worries about man playing God.

So controversial is Terminator that the company that stands the most to gain from it--St. Louis-based Monsanto Co.--talks now of shelving it. Monsanto is one the major players in biotechnology. Pending Justice Department approval, the company is also planning to acquire Delta & Pine Land Co.

That seed company's genetically modified bug- and herbicide-resistant cotton plants account for nearly 60 percent of the crop grown in the United States. Those varieties are credited in some circles for winning a war against insects that were on the verge of chasing cotton out of Texas and Oklahoma.

Delta & Pine Land also shares with the U.S. Department of Agriculture the patent on Terminator technology. Environmentalists have feared the merger would mean the bundling of Terminator with existing biotechnology.

That, they suspect, could lead to both environmental and social problems. Concentration of power

Already, seed and agriculture chemical companies are merging into a larger, more concentrated few. John Ikerd, an agriculture economist at the University of Missouri, worries that Terminator technology could help those companies achieve a monopoly over the world's agricultural gene pool.

"I can't think of any more powerful economic position to be in than to control the seed that determines a country's food supply," he said. 

That, Ikerd warns, could create a sort of modern-age feudal system of agriculture, with farmers acting as serfs beholden to seed companies. 

"I deal a lot with Third World agriculture," Ikerd said. "These are people who are lucky if they can afford to buy the technology once. But how about some poor devil in Peru or Bangladesh or whatever? Terminator technology is going to doom his ability to grow crops the next year." 

Ikerd and others foresee further concentration of the expertise needed to develop new seeds into companies with a poor record for serving the needs of Third World farmers.

"The farmers are going to end up in a real bind, where they'll be stuck growing what the seed companies make available," said Margaret Mellon, a molecular biologist and attorney at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Farmers won't be independent decision makers."

Rockefeller Foundation president Gordon Conway told Monsanto's board of directors in June that his organization, which is involved in farming in developing countries, was opposed to Terminator. 

Last month Monsanto chairman and chief executive officer Robert Shapiro responded in a letter, saying "we are making a public commitment not to commercialize ... Terminator."

But later in the letter he qualified that position, saying that use of the technology was being delayed "until a full airing of the issues is complete and we have responded publicly to the concerns that are raised."

Monsanto's scientists are divided on the issue.

Meantime in Lubbock, Oliver and his colleagues tend to tobacco plants designed to test the Terminator. If that works, they will move on to cotton, soybeans, wheat and rice.

Oliver contends Terminator holds powerful incentives for industry to perfect herbicide-immune, bug-fighting, drought-resistant crops that could bring Third World farmers out of their hand-to-mouth existence. 

"I truly believe biotechnology is our only hope for feeding the world," Oliver said. Terminator, he said, "will make biotechnology more and more economically sensible."

And Delta & Pine Land is moving ahead as if Terminator is headed for market.

"The merger (with Monsanto) has not occurred yet," said Harry Collins, a geneticist and vice president of technology transfer at Delta & Pine Land. "As of right now we're continuing with our research" and the company expects to be selling Terminator cotton by the 2005 planting season. The work goes on, he said, because the theft of seed technology must be stopped.

Three years ago, members of a South American delegation visiting Delta & Pine Land plots near the company's headquarters in Scott, Miss., were caught stashing genetically modified cotton seeds in their pockets. 

"They were trying to do in 10 minutes," Collins said, "what it took us 10 years to accomplish."

What protects seed company intellectual property could also defend the environment, said Allison Snow, a plant ecologist at Ohio State University.

"From an ecological standpoint," she said, "I think it would do a lot more good than harm" by reducing the chance that a genetically engineered plant would pass on traits to wild species.

One school of thought, however, suspects that Terminator could have the unintended effect of increasing the development of superweeds.

The Roundup brand herbicide, a Monsanto specialty that kills nearly everything green it is sprayed on, does not harm so-called Roundup Ready crops. That means a farmer can wait for crops to bloom and spray only once a season, a time- and money-saving advantage. 

Roundup Ready crops have been wildly popular in the United States. That's made the herbicide more popular, too. But it's fed fears that more farmers spraying Roundup increases the chances for the emergence of a mutant, but naturally occurring, herbicide-immune weed.

"If resistance is out there, and we spray enough herbicide, we'll probably find it," said Michael Christoffers, a scientist at North Dakota State University who sees Terminator as significant barrier to the evolution of superweeds.

Some critics worry that Terminator crops could cross with wild plants and spread a generalized infertility through the ecosystem. Supporters say that couldn't happen because sterile plants, by definition, can't pass on their genetics.

Then there's the possibility of Terminator working well, but not perfectly.

A crop that's 90 percent sterile would probably protect a biotech company's investment--although it might let laboratory genetics escape into the wild--because it wouldn't be worthwhile to a farmer to plant seed if only 10 percent of it would germinate. 

"To be effective at preventing gene flow it has to be 100 percent effective," said Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. "(But) it does not have to work perfectly to provide economic advantage for the company."