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No to GMO's
Civil Society vs Corporate Empire
Mae-Wan Ho
Talk presented in Progressive Farm Leaders Summit on Genetic
Manipulation and Agriculture, Coalition of Family Farmers, USA, Mannassas,
Virginia, September 11, 1999
Friends and colleagues! It is great to be here with you. As has been
made clear by speakers in the previous panel, the issue is not just
whether we should accept GM crops. We are involved in the biggest, most
inclusive, world-wide civil rights movement of the century, if not the
millenium, and it is against the corporate empire that has ruthlessly
exploited and ruined all of the earth's resources, to make the rich ever
richer, and the poor ever poorer and hungrier. And now, to top it all, the
corporate empire is taking possession of life and our life-support system,
to use as stakes in a final gamble with a Frankenstein science and
technology that has the potential to destroy all life on earth. As some of
you will know, the movement has been going on for well over twenty years.
I am a late-comer, an ex-ivory tower academic who has been moved and
inspired to join in the struggle since 1994.
There are very brave people in the movement, who are accepting arrest
and harassment to put our case to our Governments. The destruction of GM
field trials in the UK by Genetix Snowball and others has been grabbing
the international headlines, but that kind of action started several years
ago in Germany. It is now also happening in Ireland, France, India,
Brazil, and I am told, in your country as well. The perpetrators are not
the usual eco-warriors, but ordinary citizens like you and me, from all
age groups and right across the social spectrum, literally from prince to
pauper. I was an expert witness helping to defend seven people who took
civil disobedience action against Monsanto's GM test sites in Ireland.
Among the seven was a journalist, a lawyer and 84-year old author and
organic farmer, John Seymour, who compares the invasion of Ireland by
Monsanto's "genetically mutilated" crops to the invasion by the
Norman army, and sees it his duty to defend his country. "And if I
have to go to prison because of it then I will go with a good will, and
make the best of it, and when I get out I will try to stop them again!"
The resistance to GM crops is world-wide.
In India, I met angry farmers calling for a ban on GM crops. They burnt
the field trials in a "cremate Monsanto" campaign, followed by
the "Monsanto quit India" campaign. In the region of South Asia,
a large coalition of ngos representing millions of farmers launched a
two-prong attack: a resistance campaign directed against all genetic
engineering corporations and a seed-saving campaign to save and preserve
traditional seeds, which alone can truly feed the hungry people in the
world. Similar resistance and seed-saving campaigns are happening
elsewhere. A coalition of Latin American ngos have declared they will not
accept GM crops. In Brazil, the agricultural minister of the State of Rio
Grande do Sul was the first to declare his State GM-free, and a remarkable
group of eminent judges and lawyers played a major role in getting
Monsanto's GM soya banned from the whole country. Monsanto has appealed
three times and failed to get the federal court decision overturned. At
the same time, Brazil is drafting biodiversity/biosafety laws in order to
protect their genetic resources and indigenous knowledge from biopiracy.
In Japan, three of the largest consumer associations, with membership
running into millions and hundreds of thousands, succeeded in getting
mandatory labelling of GM products. Tewolde Egziabher of Ethiopia, leading
spokesperson of the African Region, has rejected the technology as "neither
safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial." The
African Region has taken the lead in drafting the most comprehensive
International Biosafety Protocol under the UN Convention on Biological
Diversity in order to regulate the use and transport of genetic engineered
products. The negotiations broke down in Cartegena, Columbia, this
February, blocked by the US and its 5 allies of the Miami Group against
the overwhelming majority of the 170 countries who have signed onto the
Convention on Biological Diversity. Since then, African countries have
been drafting Biosafety Law for the entire region, in order to protect
themselves against the dumping of GM crops and products. The European
Union has a de facto moratorium at least until 2002, but consumer
resistance has already led to all major food chains and suppliers to
declare themselves GM-free.
Although consumers reject GM products primarily on grounds of safety,
farmers do so because of the threat of seed monopoly. Farmers have always
depended on saving seeds and replanting them, and 85% of the farmer in the
Third World still do so. It is the symbiotic linkage of the human
life-cycle to that of crop-plants that perpetuates and propagates both.
Corporate patents are now preventing farmers from saving and replanting
under penalty of heavy fines. This comes at a time when, within the past
10 years, many farmers in the Third World have gone back to cultivating
and conserving indigenous varieties in all forms of organic, sustainable
agriculture, doubling and tripling their yields and improving their
livelihood, health and nutrition. They have been reversing the
environmentally and socially destructive trends of the so-called high
yielding monocultures of the green revolution, which have brought
financial ruin and suicides to thousands in India alone, and for the same
reasons it is now happening in US and Europe. The liberalisation of trade
and investment under the globalised economy of the World Trade
Organisation has effectively allowed corporations to buy when and where it
is cheapest and sell at inflated prices, and in addition, undercut farmers
by getting the state to subsidise dumping of surpluses. Farmers are
reduced to serfs in a feudal system run by corporations.
As a scientist, I have to say that reductionist western science has a
lot to answer for. It has been working hand in glove with corporations to
bring our planet to the edge of extinction in climate change and a string
of ecological disasters. The reason people feel so passionately against
genetic engineering biotechnology is because we know, intuitively and
intellectually, that living organisms are our last resort, our last
remaining hope for regenerating and saving the planet. I saw how organic
farmers in India can regenerate land completely laid waste by
agrochemicals and industrial chemicals and given up for good. And they did
it in just two to three years. In Japan, Takeo Furuno introduced the
'one-bird revolution' ten years ago by releasing ducklings into paddy
fields which are complex ecosystems of rice plants, nitrogen-fixing
duckweed, roach, daphnia, plankton, and innumerable species of so-called
weeds and pests including insects and the golden snail on which the
ducklings thrive. I am hopeful that we can reverse the destruction, and
convinced that nature's harvest is bountiful to all who, instead of
engaging in perpetual warfare against nature, learn how to work in
partnership with her.
The corporations stop at nothing to protect their patents and to
profiteer. They have even threatened to release the ultimate terminator -
harvested seeds that do not germinate - thus breaking the very cycle of
life. The terminator corporations and their scientists are playing
dangerous games with the natural resilience and fecundity of life which
are also needed to reverse the destruction and to regenerate the earth.
The power for regeneration is in the seed. It is also in the will of
each and everyone of us who cares, who, for the love of life and nature,
works for a better, more equitable and compassionate world. The power for
regeneration is especially in the farmer who understands how to work with
holistic, organic nature. Organic farmers everywhere are poets. Charles
McGuire in Ireland tells me, "When I walk into my fields, I can feel
the earth singing to me." Sultan Ismail in India says, "The soil
is a living organism. We have placental connections with the soil."
and "Trees are poems that the earth writes in the sky, But we cut
them down to fill our emptiness."
What I find most encouraging as a scientist is that after centuries of
reductionist, mechanistic thought, contemporary western science is finally
re-discovering and re-instating the same view of holistic, organic nature
that many indigenous cultures in the world have never lost touch with.
Unfortunately, mainstream biology is left far behind. It has no
appreciation of interconnected nature. It has no concept of an organism as
a whole. It thinks it can improve on nature by arbitrarily manipulating
and transferring genes, and does not realize it has created monsters. It
is a Frankenstein science in exactly the way Mary Shelley's genius
portrayed it. A cloned human embryo has even been created by transferring
the human genetic material into a cow's egg. Thankfully, they've destroyed
it at day 14, the current legal limit. The original Dr. Frankenstein, at
least, did not do it for money, while the Frankenstein science we have now
is driven and blinded by profit.
Genetic engineering is a new departure from conventional techniques and
introduces new hazards. Eminent UK scientist Arpad Pusztai was recently
victimised for calling attention to the research findings of his group,
which suggest that the GM potatoes they were testing are toxic and that
the toxicities are in the genetic engineering process. Pusztai's findings
are not the first to indicate that the hazards may be inherent to
the technology. A large literature already exists, much of it described in
my book, Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare. But the evidence
has been ignored, or dismissed by the protagonists.
Many ecological and health impacts are well-known. GM crops have created
herbicide-tolerant weeds and insecticide-resistant pests. The
broad-spectrum herbicides used with the herbicide-tolerant GM crops not
only decimate wild species indiscriminately, but are toxic to animals.
Glufosinate causes birth defects in mammals, while glyphosate is now
linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. GM crops with bt-toxins kill beneficial
insects such as bees and lacewings, and scientists in Cornell University
have recently shown that pollen from bt-maize is lethal to monarch
butterflies. You may not be aware, however, of the hazards inherent to the
technology.
Genetic engineering introduces new genes and combinations of genes into
crops whose ecological and health impacts have never been tested. Many of
these genes are from viruses and bacteria that cause diseases, including
antibiotic resistance genes that can compromise treatment for infectious
diseases. Furthermore, the methods used to introduce foreign genes are
uncontrollable. They give rise to random, unpredictable effects including
new toxins and allergens.
Most dangerous of all, the foreign genes introduced can spread, not just
by cross-pollinating related species, but to unrelated species by
infection. This is called horizontal gene transfer, in which the genetic
material itself is taken up. It has the potential to create new viruses
and bacteria that cause diseases and spread antibiotic and drug resistance
genes. The pioneers of genetic engineering called for a moratorium in the
1970s precisely because they were worried about this possibility.
Unfortunately, commercial pressures cut the moratorium short. Since then,
drug and antibiotic resistant infectious diseases have come back with a
vengeance. New viruses appear at alarming frequencies, while dangerous
bacteria are becoming resistant to all antibiotics and hence untreatable.
What we now know that they didn't in the 1970s is that DNA itself is
infectious, and can remain indefinitely long after the organisms have
died. Genetically modified DNA can spread to organisms in all
environments, including bacteria in the mouth, the gut and the respiratory
tract of mammals. It can spread in pollen and dust.
Why is genetically modified DNA any more likely to spread than
non-modified DNA? There are several reasons, the chief of which is that
because genetically modified DNA has been designed to invade and jump into
genomes, it may be more likely to jump again into other genomes. This
involves an increased tendency of genetically modified DNA to break and
join up with other DNA.
Indeed, foreign DNA jumping into the genomes of cells can itself give
rise to many harmful effects including cancer. In its interim report
published in May this year, the British Medical Association called for an
indefinite moratorium on the release of GM crops pending further studies
on new allergies, on the spread of antibiotic resistances and on the
effects of genetically modified DNA. These concerns are shared by more
than 100 scientists from 23 countries, including 37 from the US, who have
signed a World Scientists' Statement calling for a 5 year global
moratorium and a ban on patents of life-forms. It was launched this
February in Cartegena, Columbia, during the United Nations Conference on
the international Biosafety Protocol.
The biotech industry is being driven by the erroneous, outmoded belief
that genes are the most important, constant determinants of organisms, so
that by manipulating and transferring genes, new life-forms could be
created to satisfy all our needs, and that by eliminating or replacing bad
genes, we can get rid of all diseases. Instead, scientific findings for
the past twenty years are demonstrating that the genetic material is fluid
and dynamic, and can itself change in response to the ecological
environment. Indeed, genes and genomes need a stable, balanced ecosystem
to remain stable. Sustainable, organic agriculture is predicated on such
balanced ecosystems. The conditions for genetic health, similarly, are no
different from those for physiological health: unpolluted environment;
wholesome organic foods free from agrochemicals; clean and socially
satisfying living conditions. Those are the real choices for civil
society.
It is symbolic that we have gathered in Washington. We are once again
fighting for independence, this time from the transnational feudal lords.
When we win, and I am confident we will. It will be the triumph of
democracy over feudalism, of reason over stupidity, of love and compassion
over exploitation, of life over death. It will be the end of the brave new
world of bad science and big business. It will be the triumph of
sustainable, responsible science and industry working together for the
good of all.
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