More GM crop destruction

[Eos of the Eons]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kimpatsu

That's as maybe, but if the people don't want them, they shouldn't be forced to have them. The British government has done itself no favours by declaringthat the public are like 5YOs and need to be told what's good for them.

Like I said, how do you know it's the majority that doesn't want them? I think they do want them and aren't scared of them. It's those loud paranoid few teaching the public like 5yos and saying they need protection from something they actually want.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by WildCat
Please quote from a relevant article, I don't have time to read all those articles of unsupported opinions.

Here's the article in full:

Quote:

I've always been a little uncomfortable about the term "Frankenstein food". It smacks of both sensationalism and trivialisation. In politics, as in shopping, the cheaper the device, the less likely it is to last. But the label is becoming ever more germane. For not only are GM crops cobbled together out of bits of other organisms, but they have also begun to demonstrate a ghoulish ability to rise from the dead, given a sufficient application of power.

A year ago, the biotech companies' grave had been dug. They had failed repeatedly to refute the three principal arguments against deployment: that GM crops enhance corporate power by allowing companies to patent the food chain; that the long-term safety tests to establish whether or not they pose a risk to human health have never been conducted; and that consumers don't want to buy them. The companies might bluster about children in the developing world turning blind if we don't eat up our GM cornflakes in Europe, but there's no shortage of evidence to suggest that corporate control of the food chain has devastating effects on nutrition. But, though we have won the argument, we are losing the war. For the GM companies have re-discovered the old way of dealing with reluctant customers: if persuasion doesn't work, use force.

The new opium wars are being waged in the fields of North America, where many farmers are beginning to shy away from engineered seed. GM crops, they have found, are harder to sell. There is evidence that some varieties yield less while requiring more herbicide. But farmers are swiftly coming to see that the costs of not planting GM seed can greatly outweigh the costs of planting it.

Last month, lawyers warned a farming family in Indiana that the only way they could avoid being sued by the biotech company Monsanto was to sow their entire farm with the company's seeds. Two years ago, the Roushes planted just over a quarter of their fields with the company's herbicide-resistant soya. Though they recorded precisely what they planted where, and though an independent crop scientist has confirmed their account, Monsanto refuses to accept that the Roushes did not deploy its crops more widely. It is now demanding punitive damages for the use of seeds they swear they never sowed. The Roushes maintain that they are, in effect, being sued for not buying the company's products. So next year, like hundreds of other frightened farmers, they will plant their fields only with Monsanto's GM seeds. Like the opium forced upon a reluctant China by British gunboats, once you've started using GM, you're stuck with it.

But the solution proposed by the Roushes' lawyers' was a prudent one. In April, a Canadian farmer called Percy Schmeiser was forced to pay Monsanto some $85,000, after a court ruled that he had stolen Monsanto's genetic material. Schmeiser maintained out that the thinly-spread GM rape plants on his farm were the result of pollen contamination from his neighbour's fields, and he had done all he could to get rid of them. But Monsanto's proprietary genes had been found on his land whether he wanted them or not. Following the time-honoured convention that the polluted pays, Mr Schmeiser was forced to compensate the company for what he insists was invasion by its vegetable vermin.

Where the courts won't enforce compliance, governments will. In ten days' time, Sri Lanka will introduce a five-year ban on genetically engineered crops, while scientists seek to determine whether or not they are safe. The United States, worried that thorough testing could destroy the value of its biotech companies, has threatened to report the ban to the World Trade Organisation.

In Britain, the Welsh Assembly voted unanimously that Wales should be a GM-free zone. But the Westminster government has ignored the ruling and licensed trials of Aventis's genetically modified maize there. The trials are supposed to determine whether or not the new variety is safe to plant. But Aventis has already received consent to grow it commercially, even if the "experiments" show that planting is an ecological disaster. Welsh activists suggest that the purpose of the trials is to lend credibility to a done deal.

Monsanto will never repeat the mistake of seeking to persuade consumers that they might wish to purchase its products. In future, it won't have to. Like the other biotech companies, it has been buying up seed merchants throughout the developing world. In some places farmers must either purchase GM seeds -- and the expensive patent herbicides required to grow them -- or plant nothing at all.

In March the EU environment commissioner Margot Wallstrom warned that the Union could be sued by biotech firms if it upheld its ban on the sale of new GM foods. "We cannot afford," she explained, "to lose more years of not aiding the biotechnology industry". Biotech companies have been pressing to raise Europe's legal limit for the contamination of conventional crops with modified genes: in time, they hope, genetic pollution will ensure that there is so little difference between GM and "non-GM" food that consumers will give up and accept their products. The US government has begun pressing for a worldwide ban on the labelling of GM food, to ensure that consumers have no means of knowing what they're eating.

The monster has begun to walk. The technology which, we were promised, would broaden consumer choice is becoming compulsory.

This is the free trade which George Bush and Tony Blair have promised to the world. It is the freedom which, they have assured us, will overthrow vested interests, challenge market concentration, enhance competition and empower consumers. It is the freedom we must be forced to swallow.

When protesters against this forced emancipation were arrested by the freedom-loving police in Genoa, some of them were tortured, then shown a photograph of Mussolini. They were obliged to salute it and shout "viva il Duce!" Presumably because this enthusiastic defence of market forces is compatible with free trade, neither Tony Blair nor Jack Straw saw fit to complain. Had they done so, they would have spoken to one of the most senior members of Italy's borderline-fascist government, the foreign minister Renato Ruggiero. Before he became minister, Renato was director-general of the World Trade Organisation, the body responsible for enforcing free trade.

Mr Ruggiero has not changed his politics: he has long upheld the right of the strong to trample the weak, of corporate power to crush human rights. The organisation he ran has now chosen as the venue for its next summit meeting one of the most repressive nations in the rich world. In November, WTO delegates will be discussing freedom in Qatar, safe in the unassailable fortress of a country which tolerates no dissent. This is the force behind market forces.

It has become fashionable of late, especially in these pages, to claim that we can buy our way out of trouble: that through the judicious use of shares and shopping we can force companies to change the way they trade. But it is surely not hard to see that consumer choice is an inadequate means of curbing corporate power. Trapped inside PFI hospitals or sponsored schools, forced through lack of choice to buy cars, shop at superstores and eat GM food, we cannot escape the coercion which facilitates free trade. If market forces operate outside the market, then so must we.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
Like I said, how do you know it's the majority that doesn't want them? I think they do want them and aren't scared of them. It's those loud paranoid few teaching the public like 5yos and saying they need protection from something they actually want.

Recent polls of public opinion indicate that 2/3s of British people do not want GM foods.

[Eos of the Eons]

And who wrote all that in what publication?

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
And who wrote all that in what publication?

What, the polls? They've been published in more than one UK newspaper.

[Eos of the Eons]

Where, by who, how did they do the poll. Did they poll people in herbal remedy stores? How do you know they didn't?


Gotta go now, so you have lots of time to prove these claims are valid.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
Where, by who, how did they do the poll. Did they poll people in herbal remedy stores? How do you know they didn't?

These polls are genuinely respected as being well done and impartial.
If they'd polled health stores, then 100% of respondents would have been anti-GM.

[WildCat]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kimpatsu

Here's the article in full:

The Monsanto/Roush affair is indeed troubling, but the reason has more to do w/ the inability of current patent laws to address such a situation than w/ GM crops themselves. Laws can be passed to account for situations like this, I would be shocked if they aren't. I did some research, apparently the Canadian Supreme Court is due w/ a ruling in January on an appeal of the Percy Schmeiser case. We'll see what happens, but remember courts only interpret the laws, it's up to the legislators to write them in the first place.

The other cases cited in the article involve free trade disputes, specifically whether certain countries are banning GM foods not to protect their citizens health, but rather to protect their farmers from competition.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by WildCat

The Monsanto/Roush affair is indeed troubling, but the reason has more to do w/ the inability of current patent laws to address such a situation than w/ GM crops themselves. Laws can be passed to account for situations like this, I would be shocked if they aren't. I did some research, apparently the Canadian Supreme Court is due w/ a ruling in January on an appeal of the Percy Schmeiser case. We'll see what happens, but remember courts only interpret the laws, it's up to the legislators to write them in the first place.

The other cases cited in the article involve free trade disputes, specifically whether certain countries are banning GM foods not to protect their citizens health, but rather to protect their farmers from competition.

Yes, as I said at the outset, I'm not opposed to GM per se, but to the way it's been forced upon people. My beef is with the multinationals and their strongarm tactics.

[Drooper]

Kimpatsu,

There are still a couple of important assertions made by you that are yet to be backed up with any evidence whatsoever.
[list=1][*]What evidence do you have that farmers, anywhere in the world are being forced against their will to plant GM crops.[*]Where, anywhere in the world, are consumers being forced against their will to consume GM derived products.[/list=1]

All I have seen so far is:

a couple of court cases over alleged illegal use of of patented GM seed by farmers. If truye, that is more a case of farmers wanting to use the GM seed (without paying the patent holder) and the seed companies wanting to stop them - the exact opposite of your claim!

The imposition of UK parliamentary sovereignty over Wales to ensure that legal commerical activity (crop trials) should be allowed to be conducted.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by Drooper
What evidence do you have that farmers, anywhere in the world are being forced against their will to plant GM crops.

Quote:

Monsanto Sells Hunger

The biotech company threatens Africa with starvation
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 4th June 1998.

Even during the Irish famines in the middle of last century, anyone with eyes to see knew that starvation was not a purely technical matter. The potato crops might have failed, but there was no shortage of grain; instead of delivering it to the starving, however, tenant farmers were forced to surrender it to their landlords.

Famine arose, in other words, less from a failure of harvests than from a failure of distribution, which in turn emerged from a still greater want: the absence of self-determination. Without control over their own lives, the Irish could neither grow the crops they wanted, nor ensure that they each received a fair share of the land's bounty. Only the landlords and their apologists chose to represent the carnage as the result of fungus and poor yields.

Today, this pattern persists. The victims of most modern-day famines are all too well aware that the main reasons for their distress are deficiencies of distribution and democracy, while the world's fat cats continue to insist that starvation emerges principally from failures of yield.

A fortnight ago, consultants acting for Monsanto, the biotechnology company whose recent merger will make it one of the largest corporations on earth, wrote to some of Africa's most prominent academics and politicians, inviting them to sign a stirring public statement called "Let the Harvest Begin". "Many of our needs have an ally in biotechnology and the promising advances it offers for our future," it declares. "With these advances, we prosper; without them, we cannot thrive ... Slowing its acceptance is a luxury our hungry world cannot afford." The statement, with the names and titles of its signatories, would be published "in major European newspapers in early June."

While some of the recipients responded with outrage, others, inspired perhaps by the visionary language, signed up. Monsanto's name appears in such small print on the draft declaration as to be barely discernable: readers could be forgiven for imagining that the statement is the initiative of the signatories, rather than the company.

There's no question, of course, that the world will need more food, and there's also no question that more of it will need to be produced in Africa. But Monsanto's suggestion that the continent's freedom from famine depends upon its technologies would be hilarious, were it not so sinister. For Monsanto's operations can now be numbered among the hungry continent's greatest threats.

The leading edge of Monsanto's new work is not the production of food, but the production of feed: crops, in other words, grown not for humans but for animals. Last month, the company announced a joint venture with the gigantic multinational grain merchant Cargill, to produce and market the seeds of genetically engineered fodder plants, particularly maize. "The opportunity is just enormous," Monsanto's president announced, "We see the value that we can create as several billion dollars".

Feed production is a growing component of Third World agriculture, supplying the ever-increasing consumption of meat, eggs and dairy produce in the First World. It is also one of the engines of African famine, as land previously devoted to meeting local people's necessities has been expropriated to supply the rich world's luxuries. Much of Africa's most fertile territory is ideal for growing the new, more profitable strains of maize fodder being developed by Cargill and Monsanto.

But this is the least of the ways in which Monsanto threatens Africa. Three months ago, America's Delta and Pine Land Company patented a remarkable technology. Its "Terminator" gene ensures that the plants which contain it produce only sterile seeds: farmers planting these crops, in other words, will be forced to buy new stock every year. The new technology's "primary targets", are, according to the original patent holders, "Second and Third World" countries.

Four weeks ago, Monsanto bought the company. If it succeeds in inserting the Terminator into its seed varieties and maintains its relationship with Cargill, farmers could be presented with little choice but to buy its non-reproducing seed, as Cargill has already established near-monopolies in many parts of the developing world. It's a great development for Monsanto, but disastrous news for farmers, especially the one billion small farmers who produce most of the Third World's staple crops for local markets.

Monsanto, in other words, threatens to become the hunger merchant of the third millennium. Where it goes, famine will follow. And the poor saps who signed its advertisement will find themselves picking up the blame.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by Drooper
Where, anywhere in the world, are consumers being forced against their will to consume GM derived products.

Quote:

The president of Zambia is wrong. Genetically modified food is not, as far as we know, "poison". While adequate safety tests have still to be conducted, there is, as yet, no compelling evidence that it is any worse for human health than conventional food. Given the choice with which the people of Zambia are now faced - between starvation and eating GM - I would eat GM.


The real problem with engineered crops, as this column has been pointing out for several years, is that they permit the big biotech companies to place a padlock on the foodchain. By patenting the genes and all the technologies associated with them, the corporations are manoeuvring themselves into a position in which they can exercise complete control over what we eat. This has devastating implications for food security in poorer countries.


This is the reason why these crops have been resisted so keenly by campaigners. The biotech companies have been experimenting with new means of overcoming their resistance. This article reveals just how far they seem prepared to go.


Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, all of which are suffering from the current famine, have been told by the US international development agency, USAID, that there is no option but to make use of GM crops from the United States. This is simply untrue. Between now and March, the region will need up to two million tonnes of emergency food aid in the form of grain. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has revealed that there is 1.16m tonnes of exportable maize in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. Europe, Brazil, India and China have surpluses and stockpiles running into many tens of millions of tonnes. Even in the US, over 50% of the harvest has been kept GM-free. All the starving in southern Africa, Ethiopia and the world's other hungry regions could be fed without the use of a single genetically modified grain.


But the United States is unique among major donors, in that it gives its aid in kind, rather than in cash. The others pay the World Food Programme, which then buys supplies as locally as possible. This is cheaper and better for local economies. USAID, by contrast, insists on sending, where possible, only its own grain. As its website boasts, "the principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the USAID contracts and grants go directly to American firms. Foreign assistance programs have helped create major markets for agricultural goods, created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans."


America's food aid programme provides a massive hidden subsidy to its farmers. But as a recent report by Greenpeace shows, they are not the only beneficiaries. One of USAID's stated objectives is to "integrate GM into local food systems". Earlier this year, it launched a $100m programme for bringing biotechnology to developing countries.


USAID's "training" and "awareness raising" programmes will, its website reveals, provide companies such as "Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto" with opportunities for "technology transfer" into the poor world. Monsanto, in turn, provides financial support for USAID. The famine will permit USAID to accelarate this strategy. It knows that some of the grain it exports to southern Africa will be planted by farmers for next year's harvest. Once contamination is widespread, the governments of those nations will no longer be able to sustain a ban on the technology.


All that stands in the way of these plans is the resistance of local people and the protests of development and environment groups. For the past few years, Monsanto has been working on that.


Six months ago, this column revealed that a fake citizen called "Mary Murphy" had been bombarding internet listservers with messages denouncing the scientists and environmentalists who were critical of GM crops. The computer from which some of these messages were sent belongs to a public relations company called Bivings, which works for Monsanto. The boss of Bivings wrote to the Guardian, fiercely denying that his company had been running covert campaigns. His head of online PR, however, admitted to Newsnight that one of the messages came from someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services". But Bivings denies any knowledge of the use of its computer for such a campaign.


This admission prompted the researcher Jonathan Matthews, who uncovered the first story, to take another look at some of the emails which had first attracted his attention. He had become particularly interested in a series of vituperative messages sent to the most prominent biotech listservers on the net, by someone called "Andura Smetacek". Andura first began writing in 2000. She or he repeatedly accused the critics of GM of terrorism. When one of her letters, asserting that Greenpeace was deliberately spreading unfounded fears about GM foods in order to further its own financial interests, was re-printed in the Glasgow Herald, Greenpeace successfully sued the paper for libel.


Smetacek claimed, in different messages, first to live in London, then in New York. Jonathan Matthews checked every available public record and found that no person of that name appeared to exist in either city. But last month his techie friends discovered something interesting. Three of these messages, including the first one Smetacek sent, arrived with the internet protocol address 199.89.234.124. This is the address assigned to the server gatekeeper2.monsanto.com. It belongs to the Monsanto corporation.


In 1999, after the company nearly collapsed as a result of its disastrous attempt to thrust GM food into the European market, Monsanto's Communications Director, Philip Angell, explained to the Wall Street Journal "maybe we weren't aggressive enough... When you fight a forest fire, sometimes you have to light another fire." The company identified the internet as the medium which had helped protest to "mushroom".


At the end of last year, Jay Byrne, formerly the company's director of internet outreach, explained to a number of other firms the tactics he had deployed at Monsanto. He showed how, before he got to work, the top GM sites listed by an internet search engine were all critical of the technology. Following his intervention, the top sites were all supportive ones (four of them, incidentally, had been established by Monsanto's PR firm Bivings). He told them to "think of the Internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does, but somebody is going to get killed."


While he was working for Monsanto, Byrne told the internet newsletter Wow that he "spends his time and effort participating" in web discussions about biotech. He singled out the site AgBioWorld, where he "ensures his company gets proper play". AgBioWorld is the site on which "Andura Smetacek" launched her campaign.


The biotech companies know that they will never conquer new markets while activists are able to expose the way their operations damage food security and consumer choice. While working with USAID to open new territory, they also appear to have been fighting covert campaigns against their critics. Their products may not be poisonous, but can we say the same of their techniques?

[Drooper]

Kimpatsu,

Nowhere in that lengthy opinion, is there any evidence that farmers anywhere are being forced to use GM seed.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

I've always been a little uncomfortable about the term "Frankenstein food". It smacks of both sensationalism and trivialisation. In politics, as in shopping, the cheaper the device, the less likely it is to last. But the label is becoming ever more germane. For not only are GM crops cobbled together out of bits of other organisms, but they have also begun to demonstrate a ghoulish ability to rise from the dead, given a sufficient application of power.

A year ago, the biotech companies' grave had been dug. They had failed repeatedly to refute the three principal arguments against deployment: that GM crops enhance corporate power by allowing companies to patent the food chain; that the long-term safety tests to establish whether or not they pose a risk to human health have never been conducted; and that consumers don't want to buy them. The companies might bluster about children in the developing world turning blind if we don't eat up our GM cornflakes in Europe, but there's no shortage of evidence to suggest that corporate control of the food chain has devastating effects on nutrition. But, though we have won the argument, we are losing the war. For the GM companies have re-discovered the old way of dealing with reluctant customers: if persuasion doesn't work, use force.

The new opium wars are being waged in the fields of North America, where many farmers are beginning to shy away from engineered seed. GM crops, they have found, are harder to sell. There is evidence that some varieties yield less while requiring more herbicide. But farmers are swiftly coming to see that the costs of not planting GM seed can greatly outweigh the costs of planting it.

Last month, lawyers warned a farming family in Indiana that the only way they could avoid being sued by the biotech company Monsanto was to sow their entire farm with the company's seeds. Two years ago, the Roushes planted just over a quarter of their fields with the company's herbicide-resistant soya. Though they recorded precisely what they planted where, and though an independent crop scientist has confirmed their account, Monsanto refuses to accept that the Roushes did not deploy its crops more widely. It is now demanding punitive damages for the use of seeds they swear they never sowed. The Roushes maintain that they are, in effect, being sued for not buying the company's products. So next year, like hundreds of other frightened farmers, they will plant their fields only with Monsanto's GM seeds. Like the opium forced upon a reluctant China by British gunboats, once you've started using GM, you're stuck with it.

But the solution proposed by the Roushes' lawyers' was a prudent one. In April, a Canadian farmer called Percy Schmeiser was forced to pay Monsanto some $85,000, after a court ruled that he had stolen Monsanto's genetic material. Schmeiser maintained out that the thinly-spread GM rape plants on his farm were the result of pollen contamination from his neighbour's fields, and he had done all he could to get rid of them. But Monsanto's proprietary genes had been found on his land whether he wanted them or not. Following the time-honoured convention that the polluted pays, Mr Schmeiser was forced to compensate the company for what he insists was invasion by its vegetable vermin.

Where the courts won't enforce compliance, governments will. In ten days' time, Sri Lanka will introduce a five-year ban on genetically engineered crops, while scientists seek to determine whether or not they are safe. The United States, worried that thorough testing could destroy the value of its biotech companies, has threatened to report the ban to the World Trade Organisation.

In Britain, the Welsh Assembly voted unanimously that Wales should be a GM-free zone. But the Westminster government has ignored the ruling and licensed trials of Aventis's genetically modified maize there. The trials are supposed to determine whether or not the new variety is safe to plant. But Aventis has already received consent to grow it commercially, even if the "experiments" show that planting is an ecological disaster. Welsh activists suggest that the purpose of the trials is to lend credibility to a done deal.

Monsanto will never repeat the mistake of seeking to persuade consumers that they might wish to purchase its products. In future, it won't have to. Like the other biotech companies, it has been buying up seed merchants throughout the developing world. In some places farmers must either purchase GM seeds -- and the expensive patent herbicides required to grow them -- or plant nothing at all.

In March the EU environment commissioner Margot Wallstrom warned that the Union could be sued by biotech firms if it upheld its ban on the sale of new GM foods. "We cannot afford," she explained, "to lose more years of not aiding the biotechnology industry". Biotech companies have been pressing to raise Europe's legal limit for the contamination of conventional crops with modified genes: in time, they hope, genetic pollution will ensure that there is so little difference between GM and "non-GM" food that consumers will give up and accept their products. The US government has begun pressing for a worldwide ban on the labelling of GM food, to ensure that consumers have no means of knowing what they're eating.

The monster has begun to walk. The technology which, we were promised, would broaden consumer choice is becoming compulsory.

This is the free trade which George Bush and Tony Blair have promised to the world. It is the freedom which, they have assured us, will overthrow vested interests, challenge market concentration, enhance competition and empower consumers. It is the freedom we must be forced to swallow.

When protesters against this forced emancipation were arrested by the freedom-loving police in Genoa, some of them were tortured, then shown a photograph of Mussolini. They were obliged to salute it and shout "viva il Duce!" Presumably because this enthusiastic defence of market forces is compatible with free trade, neither Tony Blair nor Jack Straw saw fit to complain. Had they done so, they would have spoken to one of the most senior members of Italy's borderline-fascist government, the foreign minister Renato Ruggiero. Before he became minister, Renato was director-general of the World Trade Organisation, the body responsible for enforcing free trade.

Mr Ruggiero has not changed his politics: he has long upheld the right of the strong to trample the weak, of corporate power to crush human rights. The organisation he ran has now chosen as the venue for its next summit meeting one of the most repressive nations in the rich world. In November, WTO delegates will be discussing freedom in Qatar, safe in the unassailable fortress of a country which tolerates no dissent. This is the force behind market forces.

It has become fashionable of late, especially in these pages, to claim that we can buy our way out of trouble: that through the judicious use of shares and shopping we can force companies to change the way they trade. But it is surely not hard to see that consumer choice is an inadequate means of curbing corporate power. Trapped inside PFI hospitals or sponsored schools, forced through lack of choice to buy cars, shop at superstores and eat GM food, we cannot escape the coercion which facilitates free trade. If market forces operate outside the market, then so must we.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Tony Blair's speech to the Royal Society last Thursday was a wonderful jumble of misconceptions and logical elisions. He managed to confuse science with its technological products. GM crops are no more "science" than cars, computers or washing machines, and those opposing them are no more "anti-science" than people who don't like the Millennium Dome are "anti-architecture".

He suggested that in the poor world people welcome genetic engineering. It was unfortunate that the example he chose was the biotech industry in Bangalore in south-west India. Bangalore happens to be the centre of the world's most effective protests against GM crops, the capital of a state in which anti-GM campaigners outnumber those in the UK by 1,000 to one. Like most biotech enthusiasts, he ignored the key concern of the activists: the corporate takeover of the food chain, and its devastating consequences for food security.

But it would be wrong to blame Blair alone for these misconstructions. The prime minister was simply repeating a suite of arguments formulated elsewhere. Over the past month, activists have slowly been discovering where that "elsewhere" may be.

Two weeks ago, this column showed how the Bivings Group, a PR company contracted to Monsanto, had invented fake citizens to post messages on internet listservers. These phantoms had launched a campaign to force Nature magazine to retract a paper it had published, alleging that native corn in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen. But this, it now seems, is just one of hundreds of critical interventions with which PR companies hired by big business have secretly guided the biotech debate over the past few years.

While I was writing the last piece, Bivings sent me an email fiercely denying that it had anything to do with the fake correspondents "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", who started the smear campaign against the Nature paper. Last week I checked the email's technical properties. They contained the identity tag "bw6.bivwood.com". The message came from the same computer terminal that "Mary Murphy" has used. New research coordinated by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews appears to have unmasked the fake persuaders: "Mary Murphy" is being posted by a Bivings web designer, writing from both the office and his home computer in Hyattsville, Maryland; while "Andura Smetacek" appears to be the company's chief internet marketer.

Not long ago, the website slashdot.com organised a competition for hackers: if they could successfully break into a particular server, they got to keep it. Several experienced hackers tested their skills. One of them was one using a computer identified as bw6.bivwood.com.

Though someone in the Bivings office appears to possess hacking skills, there is no evidence that Bivings has ever made use of them. But other biotech lobbyists do appear to have launched hacker attacks. Just before the paper in Nature was publicly challenged, the server hosting the accounts used by its authors was disabled by a particularly effective attack which crippled their capacity to fight back. The culprit has yet to be identified.

Bivings is the secret author of several of the websites and bogus citizens' movements which have been coordinating campaigns against environmentalists. One is a fake scientific institute called the "Centre for Food and Agricultural Research". Bivings has also set up the "Alliance for Environmental Technology", a chlorine industry lobby group. Most importantly, Bivings appears to be connected with AgBioWorld, the genuine website run by CS Prakash, a plant geneticist at Tuskegee University, Alabama.

AgBioWorld is perhaps the most influential biotech site on the web. Every day it carries new postings about how GM crops will feed the world, new denunciations of the science which casts doubt on them and new attacks on environmentalists. It was here that the fake persuaders invented by Bivings launched their assault on the Nature paper. AgBioWorld then drew up a petition to have the paper retracted.

Prakash claims to have no links with Bivings but, as the previous article showed, an error message on his site suggests that it is or was using the main server of the Bivings Group. Jonathan Matthews, who found the message, commissioned a full technical audit of AgBioWorld. His web expert has now found 11 distinctive technical fingerprints shared by AgBioWorld and Bivings's Alliance for Environmental Technology site. The sites appear, he concludes, to have been created by the same programmer.

Though he lives and works in the United States, CS Prakash claims to represent the people of the third world. But he set up AgBioWorld with Greg Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the far-right libertarian lobby group funded by such companies as Philip Morris, Pfizer and Dow Chemical. Conko has collaborated with Matthew Metz, one of the authors of the scientific letters to Nature seeking to demolish the maize paper, to produce a highly partisan guide to biotechnology on the AgBioWorld site. The Competitive Enterprise Institute boasts that it "played a key role in the creation" of a petition of scientists supporting biotech (ostensibly to feed the third world) launched by Prakash. Unaware that it had been devised by a corporate lobby group, 3,000 scientists, three Nobel laureates among them, signed up.

Bivings is just one of several public relations agencies secretly building a parallel world on the web. Another US company, Berman & Co, runs a fake public interest site called ActivistCash.com, which seeks to persuade the foundations giving money to campaigners to desist. Berman also runs the "Centre for Consumer Freedom", which looks like a citizens' group but lobbies against smoking bans, alcohol restrictions and health warnings on behalf of tobacco, drinks and fast food companies. The marketing firm Nichols Dezenhall set up a site called StopEcoViolence, another "citizens' initiative", demonising activists. In March, Nichols Dezenhall linked up with Prakash's collaborator, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to sponsor a conference for journalists and corporate executives on "eco-extremism".

What is fascinating about these websites, fake groups and phantom citizens is that they have either smelted or honed all the key weapons currently used by the world's biotech enthusiasts: the conflation of activists with terrorists, the attempts to undermine hostile research, the ever more nuanced claims that those who resist GM crops are anti-science and opposed to the interests of the poor. The hatred directed at activists over the past few years is, in other words, nothing of the kind. We have been confronted, in truth, by the crafted response of an industry without emotional attachment.

Tony Blair was correct when he observed on Thursday that "there is only a small band of people... who genuinely want to stifle informed debate". But he was wrong to identify this small group as those opposed to GM crops. Though he didn't know it, the people seeking to stifle the debate are the ones who wrote his speech; not in the days before he delivered it, but in the years in which the arguments he used were incubated.

For more, go to www.monbiot.com

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by Drooper
Kimpatsu,

Nowhere in that lengthy opinion, is there any evidence that farmers anywhere are being forced to use GM seed.

I haven't finished posting, yet.
Alternatively, go to www.monbiot.com and read them for yourself. I can't copy any more over without violating JREF's plagiarism rule, so you'll have to do the rest yourself.

[Drooper]

I have to repeat myself her. You have just posted some long winded opinion, from one person. There is still no evidence that suggests any famrers anywhere in the world are being forced to plant GM seed.


Also, I would suggest you stop cutting and pasting in this way, it doesn't serve any purpose. Make the point youself, in your own words. Present the evidence to support your argument and paste a link if necessary to support you own words.

[Kimpatsu]

These are not unsupported opinions; these are op-ed pieces based on fact.
That you are unwillign to visit the monbiot website and read the evidence for yourself is very telling. Until you do, there is no point to your continuing to post. You are unwilling to read the evidence even though I have supplied the link. What more is there to say?

[Martin]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kimpatsu
And as I've said before, it's not GM per se to which I'm opposed; it's the application of GM in the Third World. A padlock on the food chain

Hmmm...I wonder what the Third World nations who are themselves researching GM and its applications to their problems would have to say about that?

[Drooper]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kimpatsu
These are not unsupported opinions; these are op-ed pieces based on fact.
That you are unwillign to visit the monbiot website and read the evidence for yourself is very telling. Until you do, there is no point to your continuing to post. You are unwilling to read the evidence even though I have supplied the link. What more is there to say?

I asked for evidence and you provide none.

FYI, I did visit Monbiot's site and as you state it is a wealth of op-ed. Also FYI, that stands for Opinion and Editorial.

I asked you for facts, you gave me opinion. So I will try one last time.

Produce any evidence that any farmer, anywhere in the world is being forced to use GM seed.

[Kimpatsu]

If you reject the evidence supplied by George Monbiot as not being fact, there is nothing more that I can offer. I have shown you the zebra, I have shown you its stripes, and you still insisit that it's a donkey.
Well, at least I'm not the ass...

[CurtC]

Kimpatsu, there has to be a middle ground between simply posting a link to the home page of George's web site, and copying the article and pasting it into your reply. Instead, please tell us what your argument is, and then back it up with a link to a specific web page.

The only evidence that I can find to back up your assertion that people are being forced to plant GM is the case of the Roushes. Even that is pretty indirect - if the Roushes are convinced that they did nothing wrong, then they should have a pretty easy time taking on Monsanto. But if it's more like the case of Percy Schmeiser, they're out of luck. Despite what's printed in the Guardian, judges have reviewed the evidence in that case and found Mr. Schmeiser to be lying. That's why they assessed punitive damages against him.

And you haven't posted anything I could find that would hint that the US or a corporation is forcing farmers in other countries to plant GM. Padlock on the food chain my ass - they're just trying to sell seed, and the US is trying to remove unfair trade restrictions that would keep that from happening.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by CurtC
Kimpatsu, there has to be a middle ground between simply posting a link to the home page of George's web site, and copying the article and pasting it into your reply. Instead, please tell us what your argument is, and then back it up with a link to a specific web page.

The only evidence that I can find to back up your assertion that people are being forced to plant GM is the case of the Roushes. Even that is pretty indirect - if the Roushes are convinced that they did nothing wrong, then they should have a pretty easy time taking on Monsanto. But if it's more like the case of Percy Schmeiser, they're out of luck. Despite what's printed in the Guardian, judges have reviewed the evidence in that case and found Mr. Schmeiser to be lying. That's why they assessed punitive damages against him.

And you haven't posted anything I could find that would hint that the US or a corporation is forcing farmers in other countries to plant GM. Padlock on the food chain my ass - they're just trying to sell seed, and the US is trying to remove unfair trade restrictions that would keep that from happening.

No, the US si trying to create a series of turnstyles; they can sell, but punitive tarriffs against third world countries trying to import.
If you didn't read all the articles, you should take the time to do so. George Monbiot is the premier human rights campaigner in Europe.
Of course, if you see nothing wrong with the hegemony of unelected corporations, I can't help you. People are dying. Actively fight to prevent it, or be part of the problem. But when the battle lines are drawn, I for one would like to know on which side you stand.

[CurtC]

Quote:

Kimpatsu wrote:
No, the US si trying to create a series of turnstyles; they can sell, but punitive tarriffs against third world countries trying to import.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to tell me here.

Quote:

People are dying. Actively fight to prevent it, or be part of the problem. But when the battle lines are drawn, I for one would like to know on which side you stand.

I trust that given the freedom to choose, people will act in their own best interests. Therefore I'm for removing restrictions on growing, importing, or selling GM food. The way it looks to me, people are dying and you're denying them the tools to help themselves.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

Originally posted by CurtC
I trust that given the freedom to choose, people will act in their own best interests. Therefore I'm for removing restrictions on growing, importing, or selling GM food. The way it looks to me, people are dying and you're denying them the tools to help themselves.

You remove ALL restrictions, fine. But at the moment, the West expects to enter Third World markets while subsidising their own farmers unfairly, so that third world agrarian economies can't compete. Make sure when you remove the restrictions, it's ALL of them.

[CurtC]

I'm glad to see that after three pages, we end up agreeing.

[RichardR]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kimpatsu
If you reject the evidence supplied by George Monbiot as not being fact, there is nothing more that I can offer. I have shown you the zebra, I have shown you its stripes, and you still insisit that it's a donkey.
Well, at least I'm not the ass...

Kimpatsu:

I have to agree with Drooper. You need to provide a link to some specific piece of evidence that supports your claim, with preferably a short quote that directly supports your claim. Cut and paste of long pieces of screed such as this does not really do it.

[Kimpatsu]

Quote:

The real problem with engineered crops, as this column has been pointing out for several years, is that they permit the big biotech companies to place a padlock on the foodchain. By patenting the genes and all the technologies associated with them, the corporations are manoeuvring themselves into a position in which they can exercise complete control over what we eat. This has devastating implications for food security in poorer countries.

Quote:

Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, all of which are suffering from the current famine, have been told by the US international development agency, USAID, that there is no option but to make use of GM crops from the United States.

Quote:

Six months ago, this column revealed that a fake citizen called "Mary Murphy" had been bombarding internet listservers with messages denouncing the scientists and environmentalists who were critical of GM crops. The computer from which some of these messages were sent belongs to a public relations company called Bivings, which works for Monsanto. The boss of Bivings wrote to the Guardian, fiercely denying that his company had been running covert campaigns. His head of online PR, however, admitted to Newsnight that one of the messages came from someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services". But Bivings denies any knowledge of the use of its computer for such a campaign

Is this enough, or do you want more?

[RichardR]

The real problem with engineered crops, as this column has been pointing out for several years, is that they permit the big biotech companies to place a padlock on the foodchain. By patenting the genes and all the technologies associated with them, the corporations are manoeuvring themselves into a position in which they can exercise complete control over what we eat. This has devastating implications for food security in poorer countries.

Does this stop poor countries from using non GM crops? I don't see why.

Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, all of which are suffering from the current famine, have been told by the US international development agency, USAID, that there is no option but to make use of GM crops from the United States.

Original source?

And what authority does USAID have to enforce this and prevent those countries from getting seed elsewhere?

Six months ago, this column revealed that a fake citizen called "Mary Murphy" had been bombarding internet listservers with messages denouncing the scientists and environmentalists who were critical of GM crops. The computer from which some of these messages were sent belongs to a public relations company called Bivings, which works for Monsanto. The boss of Bivings wrote to the Guardian, fiercely denying that his company had been running covert campaigns. His head of online PR, however, admitted to Newsnight that one of the messages came from someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services". But Bivings denies any knowledge of the use of its computer for such a campaign

So one company has been sending out misinformation. Hardly evidence that evidence that any farmer is being forced to use GM seed.

Kimpatsu, I don't know if farmers are being forced to use GM seed against their will, or if people are being forced to eat it against their will. It's not something I'd really looked into before now. I'm actually interested in knowing. You give the impression of someone who has read a lot from (mainly) this one source of yours, and have become convinced of the truth in what he is saying, but haven't really looked beyond his opinions to check the sources. I could be wrong, and I'm not trying to be argumentative, but that is the impression you give. I'm interested in knowing if you have you really viewed this information with a skeptical eye, and if you have original sources that support your claims. Thanks.

[Eos of the Eons]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kimpatsu



Is this enough, or do you want more?

Paranoid Drivel. I've heard enough from my paranoid schizophrenic mom to last a life time-but at least she has an excuse. What is the author's problem?

[Shane Costello]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kimpatsu:
If you didn't read all the articles, you should take the time to do so. George Monbiot is the premier human rights campaigner in Europe.

Premier human rights campaigner in Europe? Says who and why? BTW I took the time to read some of the Monbiot's articles, and I believe that he's selective in the facts he uses to support his case.

Quote:

Of course, if you see nothing wrong with the hegemony of unelected corporations, I can't help you.

What hegemony? The unelected corporations can't persuade the EU or Zambia to accept GM food. What kind of hegemony is that?

[headscratcher4]

Quote:

Of course, if you see nothing wrong with the hegemony of unelected corporations, I can't help you.

You write this as if this means something...it is pure quasi-marxist drivel. For interest sake, what do you think this phrase you've written means?

[Zamzara]

Quote:

But the label is becoming ever more germane. For not only are GM crops cobbled together out of bits of other organisms...

This is a blatant lie; I doubt even Greenpeace would seriously believe that this is an accurate description of GM crops.

[Wudang]

" forced through lack of choice to buy cars, shop at superstores "

Rubbish. Forced by our own laziness and convenience perhaps. I know very few people who actually need a car. I don't but I have one. I can walk to work if can be bothered. Even when I worked in the city centre instead of the outskirts where I live, I could walk to the village centre, get a bus or train, walk 5-10 minutes to work. I don't need to shop in the supermarket but it's simpler than finding the time to get to the local market. I know so many people like this writer and they have alienated me from their causes because of this attitude of "anything I do that's not totally green and in line with my espoused ethics is forced on me by the demands of modern life" when they are exposing themselves as posturing hypocrites.
I recall the clearest example was a mother on some egregious chat show who was proud of rejecting medical treatment for her kid's (forgotten but serious) condition as any form of treatment was against God's will. She wore glasses. When this was pointed out to her, she denied responsibility as she'd been prescribed the specs when she was younger. But every day since then she'd made the decision to keep using them because her convenience was more important to her than her kid's life. I'll stop now before I start swearing.

[ceptimus]

GM crops are contaminating organic crops and organic animal feed. This is putting organic farmers out of business.

Here's one link.

[Zamzara]

And so-called organic crops contaminate GM crops just as much.

[ceptimus]

Quote:

Originally posted by Zamzara
And so-called organic crops contaminate GM crops just as much.

Yeah, but that doesn't put the GM farmers out of business. A lop-sided effect you must agree.

[DanishDynamite]

RichardR:

Quote:

A link for what? I followed your advice and googled exactly as you suggested. Nothing that said it was a problem for humans to eat – in fact one of the links stated that it is not harmful for humans.

Let me ask you again: Is it now approved for human consumption?

Quote:

So do you have a reference for your point?

You say you googled the words "Starlink corn" and yet you still require a link? Half the links which appear on page 1 would have answered your question. Anyway, here's one of them.

[DanishDynamite]

Eos of the Eons:

Quote:

Yeah, references to woo woos selling you 'natural food' and encouraging you to fight this unethical pushing of GMO food on 'innocent' and naive consumers. We're all victims don't ya know.

Only an idiot wouldn't question the safety of what he ingests, when what he ingests is a new type of organism.

[CurtC]

DanishDynamite, Richard R said that everything he saw by Googling indicated that Starlink is not harmful for humans and you disagreed. Yet even reading the link you just provided, it looks like Starlink is probably not allergenic, based on the tests that Aventis did. Do you have data indicating otherwise?

And we're not saying that you shouldn't question the safety of what you eat, but that the safety of GM is at least as good as crops modified by more old-fashioned means.