Europe fights war against genetically modified food

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The wise and benevolent folks at Monsanto are launching an advertising campaign in major European newspapers this month to counter the wicked falsehood that genetically modified crops are bad for you. And just in case the cynical Europeans doubt the word of Monsanto's own spokesmen, they are getting some of Africa's leading academics and politicians to sign this stirring endorsement of biotechnology.

'Let the Harvest Begin', the ad is called, and it's so uplifting that you wonder how anyone could refer to genetically engineered crops as 'Frankenstein foods'. No, no, say the Africans: "Many of our needs have an ally in biotechnology and the promising advances it offers for our future. With these advances, we prosper; without them, we cannot thrive....Slowing its acceptance is a luxury our hungry world cannot afford."

Other prominent Africans angrily refused to sign the letter, arguing that Monsanto is arrogantly shoving this profitable new technology down the world's throat -- and that it does not help Africa. But how can they accuse the U.S.-based mega-corporation of arrogance when it keeps its own name almost invisibly small on the draft declaration?

Selling genetically engineered crops as a weapon against famine, rather than addressing the scientific or financial implications of this revolution in food, is an idea that probably originated with Burson Marsteller, the public relations specialists who did the damage limitation in disasters like the Alaskan oil spill and the Bhopal tragedy in India.

Back in 1996, when Europe's biggest biotech group was researching how to overcome the resistance of European consumers, Burson Marsteller warned that environmental and health issues were "killing fields" for bio-technology, and that "the perception of the profit motive fatally undermines the industry's credibility." So the best strategy was to reply to reasoned criticisms with "symbols eliciting hope, satisfaction, caring, and self-esteem." Like Africans promising an end to famine, for example.

Why is this propaganda only being peddled in Europe, and not back home in the United States where Monsanto is headquartered?

Because although the vast majority of American consumers say that they want genetically modified foods to be marketed and labeled separately (if they don't oppose them outright), the bio- tech giants have already won the battle in the United States.

Avalanches of cash have been poured into the U.S. political system by the bio-tech industry: "It now rivals the oil industry for weight and influence," says Ronnie Cummins, director of the Pure Food campaign. By pure coincidence, one must assume, the Food and Drug Administration now backs the industry's refusal to label or segregate genetically altered foods -- and the companies have got fourteen states to pass 'veggie libel' laws banning "the spread of false and damaging information about food.")

Thirty million acres of genetically engineered crops were planted in North America last year, and the U.S. government actively supports the industry's efforts to stop other governments from imposing any controls, or even special labeling requirements, on their products (which are indistinguishable visually from the real thing). But in Europe, the fight is not yet lost.

In Britain, for example, there are only 182 sites where transgenic crops are being grown experimentally this year (though that is twice as many as last year), and the opposition is both determined and creative.

At one end of the spectrum, the Iceland supermarket chain, which supplies 12 percent of the United Kingdom's frozen food, has banned all foods containing genetically modified ingredients though it had to go to enormous efforts to find alternative suppliers).

English Heritage and three other government conservation agencies are calling for a three-year ban on all experimental plantings.

At the other end, activists have uprooted the transgenic crops in seven test sites in the UK this year, and are now setting up protest camps where they plant the original organic crops instead.

"We may look like dirty hippies scrabbling around on a field," said the spokesman for the squatters in a field near Norwich in England, "but we're making a serious point. Consumers are being used as guinea pigs, but most don't even know that these fields exist."

This level of organized resistance to genetically modified foods in Europe -- one opinion poll after another shows that over 90 percent of Germans want all genetically altered food clearly labeled, and in Britain it hits 95 percent -- is why the big advertising campaign is being unleashed. But even if their tactics are cynically manipulative, are the bio-tech firms really wrong?

Nobody knows -- and that is precisely the problem. The implications of the new biological technology are still not clear.

Will the bio-engineered plants cross-breed with wild varieties?

Will their resistance to pesticides be transmitted to weeds? Do genetically engineered foods cause new allergies? Nobody knows -- but in the name of corporate profit these crops are being spread around the world before the answers are known.

But what about 'starving Africa'? How dare we deprive Africans of these new food technologies that will fend off famine?

Save your tears. The current generation of bio-engineered crops are almost all industrial raw materials or animal feeds -- precisely the sort of crops that African countries grow on good farmland (which would otherwise feed people) to earn foreign exchange. And what do they need the hard currency for? To pay off foreign debts, or to buy luxury imports.

Whatever their health and environmental effects, the economic effect of the present generation of bio-engineered crops in Africa is quite clear: more Mercedes-Benzes, and less food.