Ten years ago, the tobacco industry was formally identified as the enemy. The World Health Assembly approved a resolution stating that cigarette makers have operated with “the express intention of subverting the role of governments” in implementing policies designed to reduce cancer deaths.
An illustration of just how dangerous that industry is came in February 2010, when Philip Morris International sued Uruguay over graphic new health warnings on cigarette packets. Philip Morris was able to take this action under the provisions of an investment treaty between Uruguay and Switzerland. Like many similar agreements, that one allows corporations to take an entire nation to court if they encounter obstacles perceived as damaging to their profitability.
This kind of litigation could become commonplace if Karel de Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, has his way.
He appears determined to seize on provisions in the Lisbon treaty that give the European Commission responsibility for negotiating investment deals with foreign countries. India is likely to be a test case. De Gucht is hoping that he will wrap up talks on a free trade agreement with New Delhi this coming February. According to a paper drawn up by EU officials, such an agreement “shall provide for the progressive abolition of restrictions on investment, with the aim to ensure the highest level of market access and provide protection for investors and investments of both parties.”
In other words, de Gucht wants clauses in the agreement that would allow corporations sue India or the EU in the way that Philip Morris is suing Uruguay. The recent history of investment treaties has shown that because they allow for company-state arbitration, health, environmental or labour standards can be challenged on the grounds that they restrict investment. Vattenfall, the Swedish firm, is invoking a 1994 energy treaty to sue Germany over its decision to abandon nuclear power.
Making a killing
Philip Morris, incidentally, views the EU-India trade talks as an opportunity to make a killing (literally).
I have seen a copy of a letter sent to the European Commission in March 2010 signed by Kristof Doms from Philip Morris’ Brussels office and Jack Bowles, who represents British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International. The two men lamented that India is a “virtually closed market” because it applies high taxes on imported cigarettes. “In order to open the Indian market for cigarettes manufactured in the EU,” the despicable duo urged the Commission to insist on a free trade agreement that would remove all import duties they now have to pay in India.
Irrespective of whether these peddlers of disease get their way, there are strong reasons to fear that a free trade agreement will harm India’s poor.
Karel de Gucht and his team should read two important new documents.
The first one is a report published by the UN’s working group on human rights in India earlier this month. It gives an overview of the human rights situation in India, stating that the planned free trade agreements threatens the rights to health, food and work for much of the population. While that comment is directed at India’s trade agreements in general, the report zooms in on the one under negotiation with the EU, predicting it “would cut tariffs to zero for key sectors that support many producers and workers, thus exposing them to highly competitive international markets.”
The second paper de Gucht should study is a “right to food impact assessment” on the likely consequences of a trade agreement between the EU and India. It was prepared by the Third World Network, an Indian veterinary organisation called Anthra and the German anti-poverty group Misereor, among others.
Legal obligation
This study emphasises that de Gucht is under a legal obligation to respect human rights. Despite its numerous flaws, the Lisbon treaty does at least require that trade policy upholds rights of both a social and economic nature and a civil and political one.
So when trade with India is being discussed, de Gucht is obliged to recall that India is not simply a land with 55 dollar billionaires, it also has an estimated 224 million people living in chronic hunger. One of the enormous paradoxes of India is that food producers are themselves frequently vulnerable to food deprivation. About 70% of Indians depend on agriculture as their primary source of livelihood.
The impact assessment indicates that India’s dairy and poultry farmers would struggle to cope if they had to compete with cheap imports of European meat and milk products. Such farmers typically have to borrow for feed and other essentials and pay back their loans at high interest rates, making them dependent on getting reasonable prices. Women involved in small-scale agriculture would have to cut down on vital sources of nutrition like rice if their incomes were to decline, the assessment stated.
De Gucht is hoping that India’s middle class will flock to supermarkets owned by Carrefour and Tesco as a result of a free trade agreement. Those supermarkets tend to favour better-off farmers when buying food, meaning that they will bring no benefit to India’s poor. And the arrival of giant stores will surely be bad news for the family-run shops and street hawkers that form the backbone of the Indian economy.
Christmas is supposed to be a season for caring. As de Gucht tucks into his Yuletide dinner, I hope he will feel some remorse about the suffering he is trying to inflict on India.
●First published by New Europe, 19 December 2011.
Showing posts with label hunger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hunger. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2011
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Europe assaults Western Sahara
There is one surefire way of allowing the internet damage your sanity: spend too much time reading politicians’ blogs. Take a recent post from Maria Damanaki, whose career has taken her from agitating against the Greek dictatorship in the 1970s to being the European commissioner for fisheries today. “Blue should become green,” she declared in her blog on EU efforts to lessen the ecological destruction wrought by illegal fishing.
Those efforts might have some credibility if the Brussels bureaucracy was not actively encouraging European vessels to act unlawfully in the waters of Western Sahara.
In 2005, the EU and Morocco signed a lucrative fisheries agreement. Entering into force two years later, its small print stated that European fishermen may operate in Western Sahara, which Morocco has occupied since 1974, provided that their activities benefit the indigenous Sahrawi people.
To date, the European commission has not only failed to produce evidence that the theft of fish from their waters aids the Sahrawis, it has sought to justify that theft on false premises. In a new letter sent to the organisation Western Sahara Resource Watch, the commission selectively quotes a Swedish lawyer’s opinion to contend that economic activities affecting an occupied territory would only be illegal if they disregarded the “needs and interests” of the people under occupation.
This is not the first time that the commission has misrepresented the views of that lawyer, Hans Correll, whose 2002 paper had been prepared for the UN. Speaking at a 2008 conference in Pretoria, Correll said it was “incomprehensible” that EU officials could find anything in his paper that would support their case. Correll then noted that all of the payments made as a result of the fisheries accord would go to Morocco and that the Rabat authorities would explicitly enjoy full discretion over how to use them. He was so incensed about how the agreement did not refer to Morocco’s responsibility to respect the Sahrawis right to self-determination that he said: “As a European, I feel embarrassed. Surely one would expect Europe and the European commission to set an example by applying the highest possible international legal standards in matters of this nature.”
It is instructive that 100 of the 119 European vessels granted access to Western Sahara’s waters through the agreement are registered in Spain, the territory’s former colonial overlord. Spain’s manifest commercial and geo-strategic interests in this murky affair undermines the EU’s claims to be neutral in the dispute over the territory’s future. If it was neutral or even-handed, the EU would be heeding a statement issued by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (officially recognised as the representatives of the Sahrawi people by some 75 countries) in January last year. On that occasion, the SADR asserted its people’s exclusive rights to exploit the natural resources in a 200 nautical mile zone surrounding the territory.
Those resources do not appear limited to fish. In 2001, Morocco announced that it had handed licenses to the French and American energy firms Total and Kerr-McGee so that they could search for oil off Western Sahara. The companies have subsequently withdrawn from the contracts under pressure from human rights campaigners. But the perception that Western Sahara has rich oil reserves – oil fields have been found in neighbouring Mauritania - helps explain why policy-makers in both the EU and US have been so eager to strengthen their relations with Morocco. In April, 54 members of the Senate – a bipartisan majority – put their names to a letter calling on the US to effectively approve Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara.
While this grubby power game continues, the Sahrawis who fled to Algeria in the 1970s have no prospect of returning home. Unicef has described how most of the estimated 150,000 Sahrawi refugees know only the sights of their camps – “vast, flat wastelands with the harshness of one of the hottest deserts in the world”. A scarcity of fresh food there has left one in ten women suffering from anaemia.
It is not true that these refugees are completely forgotten about. In 2009, the European commission said it was “committed to assisting these vulnerable people until a political solution can be found for their plight”. It released €10 million in humanitarian aid but failed to explain that the amount it will be paying Morocco over the four years of the fisheries accord’s duration will exceed €144 million.
Isn’t there something rotten about how Europe throws a pittance at the poor, while it empties the seas of their homeland?
•First published by The Guardian (10 July 2010), www.guardian.co.uk
Those efforts might have some credibility if the Brussels bureaucracy was not actively encouraging European vessels to act unlawfully in the waters of Western Sahara.
In 2005, the EU and Morocco signed a lucrative fisheries agreement. Entering into force two years later, its small print stated that European fishermen may operate in Western Sahara, which Morocco has occupied since 1974, provided that their activities benefit the indigenous Sahrawi people.
To date, the European commission has not only failed to produce evidence that the theft of fish from their waters aids the Sahrawis, it has sought to justify that theft on false premises. In a new letter sent to the organisation Western Sahara Resource Watch, the commission selectively quotes a Swedish lawyer’s opinion to contend that economic activities affecting an occupied territory would only be illegal if they disregarded the “needs and interests” of the people under occupation.
This is not the first time that the commission has misrepresented the views of that lawyer, Hans Correll, whose 2002 paper had been prepared for the UN. Speaking at a 2008 conference in Pretoria, Correll said it was “incomprehensible” that EU officials could find anything in his paper that would support their case. Correll then noted that all of the payments made as a result of the fisheries accord would go to Morocco and that the Rabat authorities would explicitly enjoy full discretion over how to use them. He was so incensed about how the agreement did not refer to Morocco’s responsibility to respect the Sahrawis right to self-determination that he said: “As a European, I feel embarrassed. Surely one would expect Europe and the European commission to set an example by applying the highest possible international legal standards in matters of this nature.”
It is instructive that 100 of the 119 European vessels granted access to Western Sahara’s waters through the agreement are registered in Spain, the territory’s former colonial overlord. Spain’s manifest commercial and geo-strategic interests in this murky affair undermines the EU’s claims to be neutral in the dispute over the territory’s future. If it was neutral or even-handed, the EU would be heeding a statement issued by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (officially recognised as the representatives of the Sahrawi people by some 75 countries) in January last year. On that occasion, the SADR asserted its people’s exclusive rights to exploit the natural resources in a 200 nautical mile zone surrounding the territory.
Those resources do not appear limited to fish. In 2001, Morocco announced that it had handed licenses to the French and American energy firms Total and Kerr-McGee so that they could search for oil off Western Sahara. The companies have subsequently withdrawn from the contracts under pressure from human rights campaigners. But the perception that Western Sahara has rich oil reserves – oil fields have been found in neighbouring Mauritania - helps explain why policy-makers in both the EU and US have been so eager to strengthen their relations with Morocco. In April, 54 members of the Senate – a bipartisan majority – put their names to a letter calling on the US to effectively approve Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara.
While this grubby power game continues, the Sahrawis who fled to Algeria in the 1970s have no prospect of returning home. Unicef has described how most of the estimated 150,000 Sahrawi refugees know only the sights of their camps – “vast, flat wastelands with the harshness of one of the hottest deserts in the world”. A scarcity of fresh food there has left one in ten women suffering from anaemia.
It is not true that these refugees are completely forgotten about. In 2009, the European commission said it was “committed to assisting these vulnerable people until a political solution can be found for their plight”. It released €10 million in humanitarian aid but failed to explain that the amount it will be paying Morocco over the four years of the fisheries accord’s duration will exceed €144 million.
Isn’t there something rotten about how Europe throws a pittance at the poor, while it empties the seas of their homeland?
•First published by The Guardian (10 July 2010), www.guardian.co.uk
Friday, June 25, 2010
Producing more food - with less; Interview with Olivier De Schutter, UN right to food envoy
With the world’s population predicted to reach 9 billion by mid-century, the notion that a form of agriculture aimed at producing more from less can put food in everyone’s mouth may appear Utopian. Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to food, begs to differ. The Belgian professor is a champion of agro-ecology, a science that stresses the need to work with nature, rather than to try and conquer and replace it with technology developed in laboratories.
Using such techniques as water harvesting and crop rotation, agro-ecology generally eschews “external inputs” like imported pesticides. Not only is this approach far less damaging for the environment than the intensive model of agriculture that prevails today, it can highly productive, according to its supporters. Their case has been bolstered by a major new study from Essex University in Britain, estimating that agro-ecology can bring us almost 80 percent more food than “conventional” farming.
Q: Do you seriously believe that agro-ecology has the potential to end global hunger?
A: Agro-ecology does not mean simply not benefiting from modern technology. It means instead adopting the very best technology developed by farmers, producing locally the inputs they need to fertilise the soils and grow crops. All these techniques have been proven to increase yields very, very significantly.
The study covering 57 countries by Jules Pretty and his team in Essex University came to the conclusion that the average yield increase (through switching to agro-ecological approaches) was 79 percent. That is an incredible result, just by using the correct techniques.
Q: Food production has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies. What can be done to counter their growing power?
A: It’s been the wrong approach to basically develop science in laboratories and then dump this science on the farmers without taking into account their views and real needs. We need to make public decision-making in this area much more transparent and democratic. Public decision-making should be much less influenced by corporate interests.
Q: Can there be any place for chemical fertilisers and genetically modified (GM) foods in the approach to agriculture that you are advocating?
A: Fertilisers shouldn’t be demonised. Agro-ecology relies on locally produced inputs: organic fertilisers, manure. Sometimes it’s useful for one year, when you launch something, to use external inputs – phosphate, for example, to revitalise the soil. But the idea of agro-ecology is that it should then very soon become self-supportive.
GM crops is a very complicated issue. Agro-ecology is not focusing primarily on the plant, it focuses on the plant in its ecosystem, sees the plant as part of a much larger system. GM technology basically dissociates the plant from its environment.
GM foods mean a huge dependency for farmers on seeds that are protected by intellectual property rights that are in the hands of a small number of corporations. In fact, GM seed specifically is dominated by one single company: Monsanto. That creates a huge liability for farmers who are all too often falling in debt because they have to buy at too high a cost.
Q: Your predecessor as UN special rapporteur, Jean Ziegler, once said that when a child dies of hunger, he or she has been murdered. Do you agree with him?
A: We agree on the substance. Three million children die every year from malnutrition and we have one child out of three in developing countries born to a mother who is suffering from anaemia, so it’s a very serious problem. When you look at any situation and you go up the chain of causes, you end up identifying one decision made by governments, which was the wrong one. There is always a need to move beyond the technical question – why is this person starving? – to the political question – how can this be?
My role is to climb up this chain of causes and ask “why, why, why?”
Q: Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza has caused malnutrition levels there to soar. Does the blockade violate the right to food?
A: Absolutely. It’s evident that by not allowing the economic system to flourish, Israel is committing a very serious violation of the right to food, which is also the right to produce and to gain incomes. The farmers there have no inputs, they have no possibility to sell on markets; 80 percent of the population is without employment. This is destroying completely this community.
Q: The World Food Programme and other bodies have argued that the EU’s efforts to increase the use of biofuels have exacerbated global hunger. Yet the Union is refusing to change its policy on biofuels. How do you feel about that?
A: A major impact of biofuels is increased land concentration and speculation on land which drives off indigenous peoples and small farmers from the land they need for their livelihoods but on which they don’t necessarily have a legally recognised status. In all the countries I’ve visited – and I’ve been in quite a few developing countries over the past couple of years – the complaints of farmers is always the same. They fear they are going to be evicted from their land.
The single most significant driving force behind this is biofuel production. The certification criteria which the European Commission presented recently (officially designed to make biofuels “sustainable”) do not take this into account.
One thing that is completely absent from the criteria presented by the European Commission is the impact it (biofuel production) is having on equality and inequality in rural areas. It is my conviction that in most cases, if not all cases, biofuel production will benefit those who are better-off and not benefit the poorest. Instead, it will make the position of the poorest worse.
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
Using such techniques as water harvesting and crop rotation, agro-ecology generally eschews “external inputs” like imported pesticides. Not only is this approach far less damaging for the environment than the intensive model of agriculture that prevails today, it can highly productive, according to its supporters. Their case has been bolstered by a major new study from Essex University in Britain, estimating that agro-ecology can bring us almost 80 percent more food than “conventional” farming.
Q: Do you seriously believe that agro-ecology has the potential to end global hunger?
A: Agro-ecology does not mean simply not benefiting from modern technology. It means instead adopting the very best technology developed by farmers, producing locally the inputs they need to fertilise the soils and grow crops. All these techniques have been proven to increase yields very, very significantly.
The study covering 57 countries by Jules Pretty and his team in Essex University came to the conclusion that the average yield increase (through switching to agro-ecological approaches) was 79 percent. That is an incredible result, just by using the correct techniques.
Q: Food production has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies. What can be done to counter their growing power?
A: It’s been the wrong approach to basically develop science in laboratories and then dump this science on the farmers without taking into account their views and real needs. We need to make public decision-making in this area much more transparent and democratic. Public decision-making should be much less influenced by corporate interests.
Q: Can there be any place for chemical fertilisers and genetically modified (GM) foods in the approach to agriculture that you are advocating?
A: Fertilisers shouldn’t be demonised. Agro-ecology relies on locally produced inputs: organic fertilisers, manure. Sometimes it’s useful for one year, when you launch something, to use external inputs – phosphate, for example, to revitalise the soil. But the idea of agro-ecology is that it should then very soon become self-supportive.
GM crops is a very complicated issue. Agro-ecology is not focusing primarily on the plant, it focuses on the plant in its ecosystem, sees the plant as part of a much larger system. GM technology basically dissociates the plant from its environment.
GM foods mean a huge dependency for farmers on seeds that are protected by intellectual property rights that are in the hands of a small number of corporations. In fact, GM seed specifically is dominated by one single company: Monsanto. That creates a huge liability for farmers who are all too often falling in debt because they have to buy at too high a cost.
Q: Your predecessor as UN special rapporteur, Jean Ziegler, once said that when a child dies of hunger, he or she has been murdered. Do you agree with him?
A: We agree on the substance. Three million children die every year from malnutrition and we have one child out of three in developing countries born to a mother who is suffering from anaemia, so it’s a very serious problem. When you look at any situation and you go up the chain of causes, you end up identifying one decision made by governments, which was the wrong one. There is always a need to move beyond the technical question – why is this person starving? – to the political question – how can this be?
My role is to climb up this chain of causes and ask “why, why, why?”
Q: Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza has caused malnutrition levels there to soar. Does the blockade violate the right to food?
A: Absolutely. It’s evident that by not allowing the economic system to flourish, Israel is committing a very serious violation of the right to food, which is also the right to produce and to gain incomes. The farmers there have no inputs, they have no possibility to sell on markets; 80 percent of the population is without employment. This is destroying completely this community.
Q: The World Food Programme and other bodies have argued that the EU’s efforts to increase the use of biofuels have exacerbated global hunger. Yet the Union is refusing to change its policy on biofuels. How do you feel about that?
A: A major impact of biofuels is increased land concentration and speculation on land which drives off indigenous peoples and small farmers from the land they need for their livelihoods but on which they don’t necessarily have a legally recognised status. In all the countries I’ve visited – and I’ve been in quite a few developing countries over the past couple of years – the complaints of farmers is always the same. They fear they are going to be evicted from their land.
The single most significant driving force behind this is biofuel production. The certification criteria which the European Commission presented recently (officially designed to make biofuels “sustainable”) do not take this into account.
One thing that is completely absent from the criteria presented by the European Commission is the impact it (biofuel production) is having on equality and inequality in rural areas. It is my conviction that in most cases, if not all cases, biofuel production will benefit those who are better-off and not benefit the poorest. Instead, it will make the position of the poorest worse.
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Potato drags GM foods back to Europe
Genetically modified (GM) foods appear to be back on the European Union’s political menu – thanks to a potato.
Manufactured by the German chemical firm BASF, a potato named Amflora became the first GM crop to be authorised for cultivation by the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, in 12 years Mar. 2.
It is unlikely that the same length of time will elapse before the next such approval is granted by Brussels officials. Files relating to 17 other GM crops – including varieties of maize, oilseed rape and more potatoes - are on those officials’ desk and awaiting a formal rubber-stamp.
Although many of the EU’s governments are opposed to the introduction of GM foods, the Commission’s most powerful representatives have long been eager to resume the approval of new varieties. Last year, it sought unsuccessfully to force France and Greece to ditch moratoria they had placed on the planting of Mon-810, a corn variety developed by the American multinational Monsanto.
EuropaBio, a group representing the biotechnology industry, notes that some of the crops under consideration in Brussels have been grown in north America for nearly two decades. Willy de Greef, the group’s secretary-general, said that food safety authorities have “thoroughly assessed” GM crops and found them to pose no threat. “But this has never stopped some of the anti-GM activists from selling the same old story,” he said.
BASF, for its part, has wasted no time in announcing that it has developed other types of potatoes, including one resistant to the type of blight widely assumed to have caused a famine that killed one million Irish people – one eighth of the country’s inhabitants – in the nineteenth century.
Claims that GM foods have been scientifically verified as safe and could cure global hunger will be familiar to anyone who has followed the often-heated debate about their effects. The cosy relationship between the scientists happy to give their blessing to these foods and the corporations that have invested heavily in them is not as well-known.
Amflora’s approval followed a positive opinion from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy. Since its inception in 2002, the authority has delivered more than 40 assessments on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), all of them favourable. Its panel on GMOs is chaired by Harry Kuiper, a Dutchman who previously coordinated a scientific research programme involving three leading biotech firms: Bayer, Monsanto and Syngenta.
Greenpeace agriculture campaigner Marco Contiero complains that eighteen of the 21 scientists tasked by EFSA with analysing applications to plant GM foods are biochemists “with only one or two experts on the environment”.
“If we talk about releasing living organisms into the environment, we must have the advice of scientists who know about this,” he added. “The problem we have with EFSA is that it doesn’t have the means to carry out risk assessments or independent analysis of data submitted by companies.”
In relying on EFSA’s counsel, the European Commission has glossed over contradictory information provided by other authorities. The World Health Organisation and the European Medicines Evaluation Agency have both expressed concerns about issues related to Amflora, which contains a gene resistant to some antibiotics. While the potato’s starch is intended for industrial use – such as in glue manufacturing – biotech firms admit that its by-products are likely to be used for animal feed and could therefore enter the human food chain. Policy-makers on public health have warned that planting antibiotic resistant crops could undermine the effectiveness of several medicines deemed vital in treating diseases that affect humans.
The stakes could be particularly high in the case of Amflora, as it is designed to be resistant to neomycine and kanamycine, two drugs used to treat tuberculosis. Across the world 2 billion people are infected with TB, which takes 2 million lives per year. Yet John Dalli, the EU’s new commissioner for public health has defended his authorisation of Amflora. He told the TV channel Euronews that that the likelihood of the potato harming efforts to cut TB deaths is “so remote that the assessment is there is no danger at all to human life.”
Contiero, however, dismissed claims that GM foods will ultimately benefit humanity as “propaganda”. Far from offering the possibility of wonder foods that will make hunger history, biotech firms are intricately linked to an industrialised system of agriculture that helps exacerbate hardship. “Monsanto owns 90 percent of GMOs in the world,” he said. “And together with Bayer and Syngenta, it owns almost 50 percent of all seeds. The fact is that three companies – Bayer, BASF and Pioneer – also own 65 percent of the pesticide market. Biotech companies buy seed companies because this gives them a direct control of food production and food prices. Decision-makers should look very seriously at how they control food prices. This is an issue that people tend to forget.”
Originally published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
Manufactured by the German chemical firm BASF, a potato named Amflora became the first GM crop to be authorised for cultivation by the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, in 12 years Mar. 2.
It is unlikely that the same length of time will elapse before the next such approval is granted by Brussels officials. Files relating to 17 other GM crops – including varieties of maize, oilseed rape and more potatoes - are on those officials’ desk and awaiting a formal rubber-stamp.
Although many of the EU’s governments are opposed to the introduction of GM foods, the Commission’s most powerful representatives have long been eager to resume the approval of new varieties. Last year, it sought unsuccessfully to force France and Greece to ditch moratoria they had placed on the planting of Mon-810, a corn variety developed by the American multinational Monsanto.
EuropaBio, a group representing the biotechnology industry, notes that some of the crops under consideration in Brussels have been grown in north America for nearly two decades. Willy de Greef, the group’s secretary-general, said that food safety authorities have “thoroughly assessed” GM crops and found them to pose no threat. “But this has never stopped some of the anti-GM activists from selling the same old story,” he said.
BASF, for its part, has wasted no time in announcing that it has developed other types of potatoes, including one resistant to the type of blight widely assumed to have caused a famine that killed one million Irish people – one eighth of the country’s inhabitants – in the nineteenth century.
Claims that GM foods have been scientifically verified as safe and could cure global hunger will be familiar to anyone who has followed the often-heated debate about their effects. The cosy relationship between the scientists happy to give their blessing to these foods and the corporations that have invested heavily in them is not as well-known.
Amflora’s approval followed a positive opinion from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy. Since its inception in 2002, the authority has delivered more than 40 assessments on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), all of them favourable. Its panel on GMOs is chaired by Harry Kuiper, a Dutchman who previously coordinated a scientific research programme involving three leading biotech firms: Bayer, Monsanto and Syngenta.
Greenpeace agriculture campaigner Marco Contiero complains that eighteen of the 21 scientists tasked by EFSA with analysing applications to plant GM foods are biochemists “with only one or two experts on the environment”.
“If we talk about releasing living organisms into the environment, we must have the advice of scientists who know about this,” he added. “The problem we have with EFSA is that it doesn’t have the means to carry out risk assessments or independent analysis of data submitted by companies.”
In relying on EFSA’s counsel, the European Commission has glossed over contradictory information provided by other authorities. The World Health Organisation and the European Medicines Evaluation Agency have both expressed concerns about issues related to Amflora, which contains a gene resistant to some antibiotics. While the potato’s starch is intended for industrial use – such as in glue manufacturing – biotech firms admit that its by-products are likely to be used for animal feed and could therefore enter the human food chain. Policy-makers on public health have warned that planting antibiotic resistant crops could undermine the effectiveness of several medicines deemed vital in treating diseases that affect humans.
The stakes could be particularly high in the case of Amflora, as it is designed to be resistant to neomycine and kanamycine, two drugs used to treat tuberculosis. Across the world 2 billion people are infected with TB, which takes 2 million lives per year. Yet John Dalli, the EU’s new commissioner for public health has defended his authorisation of Amflora. He told the TV channel Euronews that that the likelihood of the potato harming efforts to cut TB deaths is “so remote that the assessment is there is no danger at all to human life.”
Contiero, however, dismissed claims that GM foods will ultimately benefit humanity as “propaganda”. Far from offering the possibility of wonder foods that will make hunger history, biotech firms are intricately linked to an industrialised system of agriculture that helps exacerbate hardship. “Monsanto owns 90 percent of GMOs in the world,” he said. “And together with Bayer and Syngenta, it owns almost 50 percent of all seeds. The fact is that three companies – Bayer, BASF and Pioneer – also own 65 percent of the pesticide market. Biotech companies buy seed companies because this gives them a direct control of food production and food prices. Decision-makers should look very seriously at how they control food prices. This is an issue that people tend to forget.”
Originally published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
Thursday, February 18, 2010
A surreal argument for biofuels
Could destroying the rainforests make good environmental sense?
This barmy idea is set out, albeit less explicitly, in a paper on biofuels under discussion by senior Brussels officials. Even though palm oil plantations are a major source of tropical deforestation – and hence a major contributor to climate change - the leaked paper suggests that such plantations can often be deemed as ecologically sustainable. And if that isn’t puzzling enough, it also indicates that forests that have been chopped down to make way for biofuel plantations can still be considered as forests.
Not since René Magritte completed the “This is not a pipe” painting has something as surreal been produced in the Belgian capital. Yet unlike Magritte’s work, this paper – known in Brussels parlance as a “communication” – could soon be taken literally across Europe. It is intended to guide EU governments as they formulate strategies on how to power one-tenth of all cars, vans and trucks with biofuels by 2020.
The paper has the distinct whiff of something that has been written in close cooperation with the biofuel industry.
In November last year, the Malaysia Palm Oil Council (MPOC) warned that its exports to the EU would drop as a result of new “sustainability criteria” stipulating that the use of biofuels should bring a net 35% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over conventional petrol or diesel. Malaysia’s palm oil producers have recruited the public relations firm GPlus to make its case for those criteria to be interpreted flexibly. The hiring was a shrewd one; GPlus is made up largely of ex-employees of the EU institutions, who get paid handsomely to fix appointments with their old workmates. GPlus was founded by Peter Guilford after his stint as a European commission spokesman; his current team includes erstwhile Labour MEPs David Bowe and Glyn Ford.
The MPOC has been found to have made misleading claims in the recent past. In 2008 Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against the MPOC over a publicity campaign broadcast on BBC World. According to the regulator, the MPOC’s ads gave a false impression that palm oil plantations hosted a comparable diversity of wildlife to native rainforests. The verdict appears to have made no impression on the European commission, however. Ten months later, its scientific research centre jointly organised a conference on biofuels with the MPOC in Kuala Lumpur.
Despite rolling out the red carpet for the biofuel industry, the commission has been less than transparent with green activists. Their requests for access to studies that the commission has requested on the impact of biofuel cultivation – particularly within the EU - have been turned down. A story in The International Herald Tribune this week might explain why; it quoted handwritten notes from a top-ranking farm official who indicated that concern over the environmental impact of biofuels could “kill” their development.
Meanwhile, a new study by ActionAid provides a sorely-needed reminder that the growth of biofuels does not only harm the endangered orangutans of south-east Asia. Rather, it predicts that the price of pumping cars full of crops that had been traditionally used to feed people – wheat, maize, sugar, palm oil and soy – will be a fresh upsurge in global hunger. The number of people suffering from hunger could grow from 1 billion today to 1.6 billion by 2020 if the biofuel craze continues.
Anyone feeling a sense of déjà-vu reading that warning can be forgiven. Less than two years ago, the World Food Programme found that Europe’s increased use of biofuels was at least partly to blame for the spike in food prices across many poor countries. José Manuel Barroso, the European commission chief, denied then that his support for biofuels could be responsible. Barroso is still in charge now and, by all indications, still in denial.
Originally published on The Guardian's website (www.guardian.co.uk)
This barmy idea is set out, albeit less explicitly, in a paper on biofuels under discussion by senior Brussels officials. Even though palm oil plantations are a major source of tropical deforestation – and hence a major contributor to climate change - the leaked paper suggests that such plantations can often be deemed as ecologically sustainable. And if that isn’t puzzling enough, it also indicates that forests that have been chopped down to make way for biofuel plantations can still be considered as forests.
Not since René Magritte completed the “This is not a pipe” painting has something as surreal been produced in the Belgian capital. Yet unlike Magritte’s work, this paper – known in Brussels parlance as a “communication” – could soon be taken literally across Europe. It is intended to guide EU governments as they formulate strategies on how to power one-tenth of all cars, vans and trucks with biofuels by 2020.
The paper has the distinct whiff of something that has been written in close cooperation with the biofuel industry.
In November last year, the Malaysia Palm Oil Council (MPOC) warned that its exports to the EU would drop as a result of new “sustainability criteria” stipulating that the use of biofuels should bring a net 35% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over conventional petrol or diesel. Malaysia’s palm oil producers have recruited the public relations firm GPlus to make its case for those criteria to be interpreted flexibly. The hiring was a shrewd one; GPlus is made up largely of ex-employees of the EU institutions, who get paid handsomely to fix appointments with their old workmates. GPlus was founded by Peter Guilford after his stint as a European commission spokesman; his current team includes erstwhile Labour MEPs David Bowe and Glyn Ford.
The MPOC has been found to have made misleading claims in the recent past. In 2008 Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against the MPOC over a publicity campaign broadcast on BBC World. According to the regulator, the MPOC’s ads gave a false impression that palm oil plantations hosted a comparable diversity of wildlife to native rainforests. The verdict appears to have made no impression on the European commission, however. Ten months later, its scientific research centre jointly organised a conference on biofuels with the MPOC in Kuala Lumpur.
Despite rolling out the red carpet for the biofuel industry, the commission has been less than transparent with green activists. Their requests for access to studies that the commission has requested on the impact of biofuel cultivation – particularly within the EU - have been turned down. A story in The International Herald Tribune this week might explain why; it quoted handwritten notes from a top-ranking farm official who indicated that concern over the environmental impact of biofuels could “kill” their development.
Meanwhile, a new study by ActionAid provides a sorely-needed reminder that the growth of biofuels does not only harm the endangered orangutans of south-east Asia. Rather, it predicts that the price of pumping cars full of crops that had been traditionally used to feed people – wheat, maize, sugar, palm oil and soy – will be a fresh upsurge in global hunger. The number of people suffering from hunger could grow from 1 billion today to 1.6 billion by 2020 if the biofuel craze continues.
Anyone feeling a sense of déjà-vu reading that warning can be forgiven. Less than two years ago, the World Food Programme found that Europe’s increased use of biofuels was at least partly to blame for the spike in food prices across many poor countries. José Manuel Barroso, the European commission chief, denied then that his support for biofuels could be responsible. Barroso is still in charge now and, by all indications, still in denial.
Originally published on The Guardian's website (www.guardian.co.uk)
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