Barely noticed by most media outlets, top corporations are finding ways to assert their control over policies nominally designed to serve public interests. Unglamorous trade talks between the European Union and Canada offer a prime example of the headway they are making. Since their launch in Prague last year, these negotiations have largely followed an agenda drawn up by the European Services Forum (ESF). Bringing together Goldman Sachs, IBM, Vodafone and Deutsche Bank, the ESF is determined to usher in a trans-Atlantic investment regime where elected institutions play second fiddle to unaccountable chief executives.
The forum’s principal recommendation is that an EU-Canada trade deal should be modelled on the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). More specifically, it wants chapter 11 of NAFTA to be copied and pasted into an EU-Canada accord. That chapter facilitates private firms to sue any of the three governments that signed NAFTA – the US, Canada or Mexico – if obstacles to making profits are encountered. The courts of arbitration provided for by the chapter can issue legally binding verdicts after hearings held in camera. If the ESF has its way, firms would also be able to put the European Union in the dock.
The likely implications of the ESF’s demands can be foreseen by examining the case law for NAFTA. When an American waste management company called Metalclad was ordered to cease building a toxic dump in Mexico during the 1990s, it initiated proceedings against the Mexican government. Even though there were sound reasons – for protecting human health and preventing soil and water pollution - why Metalclad had been told to stop work on a site that was already contaminated, a NAFTA tribunal found that Mexico had failed to ensure there was a “clear, transparent and predictable framework for foreign investors.” And so Metalclad was awarded almost $17million.
The EU-Canada talks cannot be viewed in isolation from a discussion taking place among Brussels officials about how imports of tar sands from the Canadian province of Alberta should be regulated. Last year a European Commission paper proposing revisions to an EU fuel quality law stated that petrol derived from tar sands would have a 20% greater effect on the climate than conventional petrol. But this warning was removed from later versions of the paper after Ross Hornby, Canada’s ambassador to the EU, objected. Hornby signalled that Canada would retaliate if a “barrier” to trade in tar sands was erected.
Should the EU-Canada trade deal be tailored to satisfy big business, Shell and other energy companies could litigate against measures that impede them from selling tar sands. And so the EU would be giving its tacit blessing to the large-scale vandalism being planned in Alberta, where an expansive boreal forest – one quarter of the world’s remaining undisturbed forest – is under threat. Operations that encroach into this ecosystem will not only harm bears, caribou and lynx but the First Nations communities, who are already suffering heightened incidences of cancer because of exposure to naphthenic acid, a constituent of petroleum that becomes concentrated in the hot water required to process tar sands.
Similarly, it is conceivable that Europe’s restrictions on genetically modified (GM) foods could be one of the first targets of aggrieved corporations once the EU-Canada deal comes into effect. Whereas the planting of GM crops can only be authorised in the EU after their probable ecological consequences have been assessed, the safeguards in Canada are considerably less robust. Last year SmartStax, a new corn designed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals to resist a variety of different pesticides, was authorised in Canada without having to go through the health and environment checks required in Europe.
As its contribution to the trade talks, Monsanto’s Canadian subsidiary has advocated that the EU and Canada would recognise each other’s standards, rather than having to introduce anything more rigorous than those currently in place. This position has been endorsed by the Canada Europe Roundtable for Business, an influential lobby group in both Brussels and Ottawa.
The strategy being pursued by the captains of industry is all the more troubling, when one considers that they are sneakily trying to attain objectives that have been rejected by separate international fora. In a triumph for the so-called anti-globalisation movement, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was shelved in the late 1990s. Discussed at the level of the World Trade Organisation, that treaty was also designed to give corporations the power to counter green or social rules they regarded as pesky.
Recently, however, a letter signed by prominent writers and activists such as Naomi Klein, Susan George and José Bové (now a French MEP) dubbed the draft EU-Canada agreement a “carbon copy” of the MAI. Both contain the same “judicial monstrosity”, the letter noted.
Often the EU’s representatives seek to portray themselves as slightly more progressive than their north American peers by bragging of how they have set deeper targets for greenhouse gas reductions or of how they are committed to maintaining a “social market” economy. Yet in reality, they are just as ideologically blinkered as Stephen Harper and his right-wing government in Canada. It was the European side, for example, which insisted that public procurement markets at both federal and provincial levels in Canada should be opened up to European competitors. Although Canada’s 10 provincial governments were not party to the NAFTA talks, they are participating in the trade discussions with the EU.
In the past few weeks, the EU has complained about entirely reasonable efforts by the Montreal authorities to ensure that new trains for its subway were made in Quebec. If the EU’s arm-twisting pays off, it will be illegal for such tenders to contain “buy local” caveats in the future, while a range of other vital services – including healthcare and water – will be opened to competition. Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” indicated that politicians across the political spectrum in Canada regarded access to affordable healthcare as a basic right. That right would be harder to protect once the business of keeping people alive is handed over to the private insurance industry.
The EU-Canada talks should be viewed against the backdrop of the wider external trade policy being pursued by the European Commission. In 2006, Peter Mandelson, then the EU’s trade chief, published a strategy known as Global Europe. It committed the Union to attack relentlessly any obstacles encountered by corporations doing business abroad. Brussels officials have had no qualms about seeking counsel from some of the least ethical players in the marketplace. When the Commission held a conference in 2008 to evaluate the first two years of Global Europe, the vehicle-maker Caterpillar was invited to thunder against air pollution standards it felt should not apply to its products. None of the conference speakers saw fit to query if Caterpillar, provider of the specially designed bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes, was a suitable source of advice.
During November, a follow-up paper to Global Europe will be published by the current EU trade commissioner Karel de Gucht. It is expected that this will recommend sticking to the objectives set by Mandelson, though to enlarge the geographical focus of trade policy. With a free trade agreement with South Korea in the bag though encountering difficulties winning approval from the European Parliament) and one with India likely to be clinched next year, the European Commission is eyeing potential deals with China and Japan.
Heedless to regional variations within its negotiating “partners”, the EU has been striving to ram through a series of largely identical trade deals. At the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, it has been pressurising India into imposing patents on medicines in a way that would jeopardise its status as a leading manufacturer of generic drugs for the world’s poor. Some African governments, meanwhile, have accused the EU of trying to bully them into accepting liberalisation plans they regard as inimical to their economic development. And the Union has gone ahead and finalised a free trade agreement with Colombia, despite receiving voluminous evidence from human rights watchdogs documenting how the Bogota authorities have connived in numerous violent attacks on trade unionists.
Back in 1999, protesters fighting the ‘Battle of Seattle’ raised many awkward questions about how the rules of world commerce had been rigged to benefit the super-rich. Global trade talks have been at a standstill for most of the subsequent decade, yet that doesn’t mean the rigging has stopped. Rather, it is taking place in a greater number of venues, making resistance to it increasingly difficult, yet no less urgent.
·First published by openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net), 29 October 2010
Showing posts with label Monsanto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monsanto. Show all posts
Friday, October 29, 2010
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)
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Forcing Europeans to Eat GM Foods
Leading biotechnology companies have been granted privileged access to the European Union’s policy-makers as part of their efforts to speed up the approval of new genetically modified (GM) crops.
With opposition to GM foods high across this continent, the biotech industry has long been frustrated with the obstacles it has encountered in placing its products on the market. In a confidential 2006 letter, the trade association EuropaBio warned José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, that the political situation “might greatly diminish” its ability to prove its theory that cultivating GM crops is in the public interest.
Following that letter, EU officials agreed that a series of meetings should be held with EuropaBio on issues relating to new GM crops. Known as “tripartite meetings”, the process also includes the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the body tasked with assessing whether releasing GM seeds into the environment poses a risk to human health.
While giant chemical and agri-business companies such as Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and BASF have been represented at these talks, no comparable access to decision-makers has been granted to critics of the biotech industry.
“There are strong indications that the European Commission puts its relationship with industry before its relationship with people standing up for nature and people’s rights,” Adrian Bebb, a campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said. “This partnership between the Commission, EFSA and industry is far too close and sometimes is not in the public interest. The Commission wants to go ahead and push more crops on Europe; its agenda is very similar to the industry’s agenda.”
Unlike many of the EU’s 27 governments, the Commission – the bloc’s executive arm - has been eager to lift the Union’s de facto ban on planting many GM crops. During 2009 the Commission tried – without success - to prod France and Greece into ending the moratoria they had placed on Mon-810, a type of corn developed by the world’s most powerful seed company Monsanto. And in March this year, it chose a potato known as Amflora as the first GM crop to be approved for cultivation in the EU in 15 years.
Internal European Commission documents also demonstrate that Brussels officials have been providing advice to the biotech industry on how to avoid problems when seeking to have new crop varieties approved.
Robert Madelin, head of the Commission’s consumer protection department until last month, wrote to EuropaBio in November 2009, suggesting that applications for crop approvals made by its firms should contain more detailed data than they tended to.
Madelin expressed concerns that a controversy similar to one in the U.S. in 2000 could erupt in Europe. Known as the StarLink case, that controversy took place when it emerged that a GM corn used in taco shells for Mexican dishes had not been authorised for human consumption. StarLink – as the corn was named – was instead only permitted as animal feed and for industrial purposes like ethanol manufacture.
According to Madelin, similar issues may arise in Europe if biotech firms do not provide complete details of all GM ingredients in any foods they wish to introduce. He therefore recommended that all information provided when applying for approvals should be comprehensive. This advice was provided as part of his desire to see “loyal cooperation” between industry and the Commission, he said.
Marco Contiero, an agriculture campaigner with Greenpeace, said it is to be expected that senior officials would advise companies on how to respect EU rules. Yet he argued that Madelin’s support for biotech firms went beyond providing advice. Madelin, he said, had been instrumental in having the Amflora potato file endorsed by the Commission.
Frédéric Vincent, a Commission spokesman, claimed there is “nothing secret or hidden” about how EU officials have a close relationship with biotech firms. Vincent added that Brussels officials are hoping to bring forward a plan within the next few months on giving EU governments greater flexibility in deciding if they wish to allow GM crops on their territory. “The Commission is just doing its job” in consulting with business, he said.
The European Food Safety Authority – based in Parma, Italy – has also been counselling biotech firms on how they should present applications for new crop approvals. In 2008, EFSA’s director Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle, wrote to EuropaBio urging that any bids should be flanked with the most up-to-date scientific information “in order to avoid unnecessary delays” in having them processed.
EFSA has been accused by ecological activists of being biased in favour of GM foods and of not assessing their likely effects with sufficient rigour.
In April, the German green organisation TestBiotech complained that EFSA had not studied the likely effects of a maize patented as Bt 1507 by the company Pioneer on butterflies and other common insects. Since then, EFSA has finalised new guidelines on risk assessment. According to TestBiotech spokesman Christoph Then, these guidelines are a “slight improvement” on those previously followed but will still mean that the factors taken into account are “too narrow”.
One major flaw, said Contiero of Greenpeace, is that the guidelines do not address what can happen if a plant or animal has its genetic structure altered through exposure to two separate GM organisms. “This is not like selling a car with two different seats: a yellow and a black one,” Contiero said. “What we are talking about is like having an entirely new car. Yet EFSA’s approach is that this would not be subject to a risk assessment. This is absolutely crazy.”
First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
With opposition to GM foods high across this continent, the biotech industry has long been frustrated with the obstacles it has encountered in placing its products on the market. In a confidential 2006 letter, the trade association EuropaBio warned José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, that the political situation “might greatly diminish” its ability to prove its theory that cultivating GM crops is in the public interest.
Following that letter, EU officials agreed that a series of meetings should be held with EuropaBio on issues relating to new GM crops. Known as “tripartite meetings”, the process also includes the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the body tasked with assessing whether releasing GM seeds into the environment poses a risk to human health.
While giant chemical and agri-business companies such as Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and BASF have been represented at these talks, no comparable access to decision-makers has been granted to critics of the biotech industry.
“There are strong indications that the European Commission puts its relationship with industry before its relationship with people standing up for nature and people’s rights,” Adrian Bebb, a campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said. “This partnership between the Commission, EFSA and industry is far too close and sometimes is not in the public interest. The Commission wants to go ahead and push more crops on Europe; its agenda is very similar to the industry’s agenda.”
Unlike many of the EU’s 27 governments, the Commission – the bloc’s executive arm - has been eager to lift the Union’s de facto ban on planting many GM crops. During 2009 the Commission tried – without success - to prod France and Greece into ending the moratoria they had placed on Mon-810, a type of corn developed by the world’s most powerful seed company Monsanto. And in March this year, it chose a potato known as Amflora as the first GM crop to be approved for cultivation in the EU in 15 years.
Internal European Commission documents also demonstrate that Brussels officials have been providing advice to the biotech industry on how to avoid problems when seeking to have new crop varieties approved.
Robert Madelin, head of the Commission’s consumer protection department until last month, wrote to EuropaBio in November 2009, suggesting that applications for crop approvals made by its firms should contain more detailed data than they tended to.
Madelin expressed concerns that a controversy similar to one in the U.S. in 2000 could erupt in Europe. Known as the StarLink case, that controversy took place when it emerged that a GM corn used in taco shells for Mexican dishes had not been authorised for human consumption. StarLink – as the corn was named – was instead only permitted as animal feed and for industrial purposes like ethanol manufacture.
According to Madelin, similar issues may arise in Europe if biotech firms do not provide complete details of all GM ingredients in any foods they wish to introduce. He therefore recommended that all information provided when applying for approvals should be comprehensive. This advice was provided as part of his desire to see “loyal cooperation” between industry and the Commission, he said.
Marco Contiero, an agriculture campaigner with Greenpeace, said it is to be expected that senior officials would advise companies on how to respect EU rules. Yet he argued that Madelin’s support for biotech firms went beyond providing advice. Madelin, he said, had been instrumental in having the Amflora potato file endorsed by the Commission.
Frédéric Vincent, a Commission spokesman, claimed there is “nothing secret or hidden” about how EU officials have a close relationship with biotech firms. Vincent added that Brussels officials are hoping to bring forward a plan within the next few months on giving EU governments greater flexibility in deciding if they wish to allow GM crops on their territory. “The Commission is just doing its job” in consulting with business, he said.
The European Food Safety Authority – based in Parma, Italy – has also been counselling biotech firms on how they should present applications for new crop approvals. In 2008, EFSA’s director Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle, wrote to EuropaBio urging that any bids should be flanked with the most up-to-date scientific information “in order to avoid unnecessary delays” in having them processed.
EFSA has been accused by ecological activists of being biased in favour of GM foods and of not assessing their likely effects with sufficient rigour.
In April, the German green organisation TestBiotech complained that EFSA had not studied the likely effects of a maize patented as Bt 1507 by the company Pioneer on butterflies and other common insects. Since then, EFSA has finalised new guidelines on risk assessment. According to TestBiotech spokesman Christoph Then, these guidelines are a “slight improvement” on those previously followed but will still mean that the factors taken into account are “too narrow”.
One major flaw, said Contiero of Greenpeace, is that the guidelines do not address what can happen if a plant or animal has its genetic structure altered through exposure to two separate GM organisms. “This is not like selling a car with two different seats: a yellow and a black one,” Contiero said. “What we are talking about is like having an entirely new car. Yet EFSA’s approach is that this would not be subject to a risk assessment. This is absolutely crazy.”
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)
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