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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2001 While the movement against global capital has been portrayed as mainly about free trade and international financial institutions, a June 23-24 teach-in, march and rally in San Diego, Cal., highlighted another important aspect: opposition to the uses of genetic engineering. Over 1,200 came out in the heat to the Biojustice/Beyond Biodevastation V event held to counter the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual convention. They were protesting what one of the speakers, Brian Tokar, called "the absorption of everything that's alive into the sphere of commercial products." The movement is not only about food safety but the hold a small group of companies have on the global food supply and agriculture. A wave of mergers has consolidated this group even more, but the driving forces are the blitz of recent patents for genes and organisms, and the ongoing restructuring of world agriculture around biotechnology. PATENTS CHOKE RESEARCH Even agricultural research, dominated until the 1980s by government and university projects, is increasingly controlled by private companies holding the patents on genes and plant varieties needed for the research. Most agricultural biotech patents and much of the world's seed business are owned by the big five: Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Aventis, and Syngenta. The "biojustice" movement is clearly having an impact. Even so unlikely a forum as the UN Development Program's "Human Development Report 2001" leveled an attack against the "debate in Europe and the U.S. over genetically modified crops" as undermining the ability of poor nations to feed their populations. Never mind that the movement exists in poor countries too, notably India, where groups of farmers have burned fields of genetically engineered crops. Never mind that people go hungry not because there is any shortage of food but because they cannot pay. Never mind that the continuing restructuring of agriculture, of which genetic engineering is part and parcel, is pushing more and more people off the land. The report holds up the 1960s "green revolution" as a shining example,
disregarding its actual consequences described by Vandana Shiva in THE VIOLENCE OF THE GREEN REVOLUTION: "Instead of abundance, Punjab has been
left with diseased soils, pest-infested crops, waterlogged deserts and indebted and discontented farmers." Where food had been grown for 1,000
years without impairing soil fertility, agriculture became dependent on fertilizer and pesticides. The making of the Green Revolution involved
"centralized control of knowledge and genetic resources...not achieved without resistance," and a major shift in "who controlled the production A MONOPOLY OVER NATURE The big corporations aim to infuse every major branch of agriculture with genetic engineering, to transform the inputs-seeds, genes, nutrients, and defenses against insects-from fruits of nature to patented commodities obtained via a market controlled by them. The first priority of corporate genetic engineering has been to produce plants resistant to the herbicides sold by the same capitalist chemical companies. Part of their strategy is to flood the market with genetically engineered food. In the U.S. it is nearly impossible to avoid them. Altered genes have even tainted organically grown food labeled "G.M. free" because crops are exposed to windblown gene-altered pollen. The fiasco with Starlink corn is an example of how all the safeguards supposedly in place do not stop genetically engineered seeds from cross-breeding, mixing with other seeds in distribution, and falsely being sold as unmodified. Right now Brazil is one of the biggest battlegrounds, with environmentalists fighting to maintain the existing ban on biotech seeds. Brazil is the only substantial exporter of non-engineered soybeans left. The increasing integration of the biojustice movement into the broader movement against global capital shows it is not only opposing certain technologies but challenging the social system that develops them in an inhuman direction, and posing the need for a new society where the human relationship to nature is not material for exploitation but rather the basis for freedom and truly human development. - Franklin Dmitryev |
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