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ISIS Press Release 26/10/04
ISP News
Keep GM Out of Europe!
Invest Instead in Sustainable Agriculture
Independent scientists, politicians and farmers have joined up to
call for a GM-free Europe, and for urgent support for non-GM sustainable
agriculture. Lim Li Ching
reports
The scientists were among a contingent of 30-strong from all over the
United Kingdom who crossed the English Channel to Brussels. Many more would
converge from the rest of Europe, making up a total of 120 who had registered
for the ISP Briefing at the European Parliament on 20th October 2004. The
event, hosted and co-chaired by Jill Evans, MEP from Plaid Cymru and the
Greens/European Free Alliance, was without precedent in more ways than one.
Scientists, politicians and farmers have joined up to call for the European
Commission to abandon its drive for GM crops and to focus instead on supporting
non-GM sustainable agriculture. Representatives from numerous civil society
organisations – organic farmers, gardeners, producers, chefs, lawyers,
doctors – and MEPs turned out to add supporting voices.
Introducing the briefing, co-chair Prinz Felix of Löwenstein,
President of the federation of organic food producers in Germany, stressed that
European agriculture is at a crossroads and that, "a major challenge for
politicians in Europe is to guarantee there will be GM-free agriculture in the
long-term".
Mae-Wan Ho, director of ISIS and member of the ISP, outlined how
scientific evidence has turned decisively against GM crops and in favour of
non-GM sustainable agriculture. The Central Dogma underpinning genetic
engineering - whereby one gene is supposedly responsible for one protein and
hence one trait - has long been superseded by the ‘fluid genome’ in
which the expression and structure of genes are constantly changing under the
influence of the environment.
She painted a beautiful picture of the living organism regulating itself
and its fluid genome as a whole, in contrast to artificial genetic engineering
that is crude, imprecise and invasive. The organism is a good model of
sustainable systems. It captures and stores coherent energy and mobilises that
energy efficiently over a wide range of activities. This is paralleled by
sustainable ecosystems that depend on diversity to capture and store as much
living energy as possible. Hence biodiversity and productivity go together, a
fact exploited in traditional ecological farming. That is why GM crop and other
monocultures are unsustainable and incapable of providing the solutions to
hunger.
Highlighting major uncertainties over the safety of the GM process, she
argued that "GM is a scientific and financial dead-end, and it is now time to
draw a curtain over it!" Based on the evidence, Ho said, the rational course of
action is to go for a GM-free Europe and a comprehensive shift to non-GM
sustainable agriculture.
Bringing home the message that sustainable agriculture works, Sue
Edwards, director of the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD), Ethiopia,
presented compelling evidence from a project started in 1996 with local farmers
and the Ethiopian Bureau of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BoANR). In
Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, as in much of the country, land degradation is a
huge problem, leading to low agricultural production and poverty. Edwards
described how various organic and land management techniques selected and
implemented by farmers there have increased yields and rehabilitated degraded
environments.
In particular, composting has increased crop yields by two to
three-fold, outperforming chemical fertilizers, and without the debts incurred
in buying chemical fertilizers. This has led to more income for farmers. Other
indicators of sustainability are apparent, such as increased agricultural
biodiversity, reduced weeds, better moisture retention in soil and increased
resistance to pests and disease.
The success of the project has been such that, from its humble
beginnings at four sites, it has now expanded to more than 90 communities
working with BoANR in Tigray. Furthermore, the Federal Environmental Protection
Authority has now adopted the approach as its main strategy for combating land
degradation and poverty throughout the country, and has started to implement
the strategy in 69 pilot communities all over Ethiopia.
Peter Saunders, Professor of Applied Mathematics from King’s
College, London placed the urgency for adopting sustainable agriculture
squarely in the wider context of climate change. Oil is a finite resource, and
climate change a reality. But as he pointed out, industrial agriculture is
energy and resource consuming, with research showing it uses six to ten times
more energy than sustainable agriculture to produce one tonne of cereal. GM
crops will only intensify that dependence, and carry unknown risks on top of
that.
Saunders stressed the need to base farming on farmers’ knowledge,
which is "not the same as doing it the old way, as we have the benefit of
modern science." Such knowledge cannot be patented, whereas GM crops allow
companies to own and control plant varieties, giving them the incentive to
promote GM heavily. "There is an urgent need to move to low-input agriculture,"
he said, "The proper role of science is to improve sustainable agriculture, not
to make a fast buck for biotech companies".
Bob Orskov from the Macaulay Institute, Scotland continued on the theme
of how sustainable agriculture is a better option than conventional monoculture
with examples from Asian countries, where multiple cropping, including
agroforestry, has increased crop yield, soil fertility and biodiversity.
In Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia, where animals are customarily
grazed under trees such as coconut and oil palm, he documented that the
practice increased both the yield of the trees and the productivity of the
animals. "A real win-win situation!" he said. Similarly, integrating animals
like ducks and fish into rice production gives much better yields than with
just using herbicides. Such multi-cultures are also possible in Europe.
Research carried out in Scotland showed that when sheep are grazed under trees,
sheep productivity is higher than if grazed in open spaces. This is especially
so in dry years. He concluded, "If we really want to support rural poverty
alleviation, we would pay more attention to multi-cropping, including
agroforestry."
Former UK environment minister Michael Meacher sketched out the changes
needed in science policies and research, to shift away from GM to sustainable
agriculture. He launched an outspoken attack on the commercialisation of GM
science. "If science is to be fully trusted, it has to be pursued with total
independence and freedom from commercial bias", he said. The policy
implications are threefold: if we want independent research we must pay for it;
no member of a regulatory committee or advisory body should have, in the
current or recent past, links to the industry concerned; and contributors to
scientific journals should fully disclose their funding sources. This is
crucial in light of his estimate that 40% of the members of scientific advisory
bodies in the UK have links to the biotech industry, with 20% linked to
Monsanto, Zeneca and Novartis.
Meacher also lamented how the European Commission seems to be buckling
under the pressure of the US-Canada-Argentina complaints at the World Trade
Organisation (WTO), against its de facto moratorium on GMO approvals. He
said it was absurd to suggest that Europe has hindered the development of GM
technology or that it has led to hunger in developing countries, as the time it
took for Europe to revise its laws is reasonable, and hunger has nothing to do
with the absence of GMOs.
While admitting that it was probably unrealistic to expect an outright
ban on GM crops in Europe, he called for a systematic programme of research
into the environmental and health impacts of the technology before further
approval, an extension of the criteria for non-approval of GMOs to include
cases that would undermine the sustainability of agriculture, and a prohibition
on the patenting of lifeforms.
Citizens are certainly not taking GM crops lying down. The growth of
GM-free zones on the continent has been phenomenal. Beatrix Tappeser from the
German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation described GM-free zones as a
self-organising process between farmers. Since November 2003, fifty GM-free
regions have been established in Germany, involving 11 600 farmers, and
covering 430 000 ha of arable land and more than one million ha of total land,
including riverbanks and forests. The Agency actively supports some of these
initiatives and is funding an information campaign on the issue. As it is
responsible for protected areas in the country, the Agency has also established
large-scale conservation areas where no GM varieties can be planted.
French farmer José Bové, representing
Confédération Paysanne and the European Farmers Coordination,
described the current peaceful campaign of civil disobedience in France that
has destroyed experimental fields of GM crops. This has come about because the
government isn’t listening. Most of the population and many farmers reject
GM crops. Around 2 000 mayors have declared their municipalities GM-free, but
the French central government has taken them to court, arguing that the
municipalities do not have such a right. Despite this, 17 French regions (out
of a total of 22) have now declared themselves GM-free.
While stressing that work has to be done to improve democracy,
Bové argued that other means must be found to make citizen voices’
heard. Hundreds of people have joined them in pulling up GM crops, including an
MEP. He vowed to continue the fight against GMOs, "even if we have to go back
to prison".
ISP member Eva Novotny summed up the mood when she outlined the
economic, social and environmental measures that should be taken to promote
sustainability and to support small-scale farmers. This means moving away from
large-scale, high-input, industrial-monoculture techniques, to local non-GM
agricultural production that supports family farms, fair prices, and
biodiversity.
The ISP used the occasion to launch the French and Spanish versions of
its report, The Case for
a GM Free Sustainable World, a complete dossier of evidence on the
known problems and hazards of GM crops and the proven successes and benefits of
sustainable agriculture (see www.indsp.org).
We gratefully acknowledge financial support for the briefing from Fondation de Terre Humaine, Fondation de Sauve, Green Cuisine, Josephine Sikabonyi for Farmers Helpline, Caroline Clarke, Brian Baxter and Roger Taylor.
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