Klaus Wiegand
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 Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 12:23 am Post subject: Force-fed a diet of hype |
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Force-fed a diet of hype
October 7, 2003
The Guardian
George Monbiot
Columnist Monbiot writes that it is curious that the UK
government, which goes to such lengths to show that it responds
to market forces, appears to believe, when it comes to genetic
modification, that the customer is always wrong. Tony Blair may
have spent six years rolling back the nanny state, but he
instructs us to shut up and eat what we>re given. The public has
comprehensively rejected the technology; the chief scientist has
warned that pollen contamination may be impossible to prevent;
the field trials suggest that GM threatens our remaining
wildlife. Yet the government seems determined to force us to
accept it.
Monbiot says that the best way of gauging its intentions is to
examine the research it is funding, as this reveals its long-term
strategy for both farming and science. It seems that the strategy
is to destroy them both.
The principal funding body for the life sciences in Britain is
the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
(BBSRC). It is currently funding 255 food and farming research
projects; 26 are concerned with growing GM crops, just one with
organic production.
We>re not talking about blue-sky science here, but research with
likely commercial applications. We should expect it to respond to
what the market wants. The demand for organic food in Britain has
been growing by 30% a year. We import 70% of it, partly because
organic yields in Britain are low and research is desperately
needed to find ways of raising them. Genetically modified food,
by contrast, is about as popular with consumers as BSE or
salmonella.
This misallocation of funds should surprise us only until we see
who sits on the committees that control the BBSRC. They are
stuffed with executives from Syngenta, GlaxoSmithKline,
AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Pfizer, Genetix
plc, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Celltech and Unilever. Even the
council>s new "advisory group on public concerns" contains a
representative of United Biscuits but no one from a consumer or
environmental group. What "the market" (which means you and I)
wants is very different from what those who seek to control the
market want.
All the major government funding bodies appear to follow the same
line.
Michael Wilson, the chief executive of the government-funded body
Horticulture Research International, recently told the Guardian
that "Britain is lining itself up to become an intellectual and
technological backwater". If so, it will be partly as a result of
his efforts. Wilson, who describes himself as "evangelical" about
GM, has spent the past three years switching his institute>s
research away from conventional breeding. He can hardly complain
about the brain drain when he has tied the careers of his
scientists to a technology nobody wants.
"The way things are going," according to Christopher Leaver, the
head of plant science at Oxford University, "plant biotechnology
is going to be stillborn here." Well, the way things are going is
very much a result of the way he has directed them. Until this
summer, he sat on the BBSRC>s governing council. At the
university, he has engineered a brain drain of his own by closing
the Oxford Forestry Institute (perhaps the best of its kind in
the world) and shifting the focus of his department from whole
organisms and ecosystems to molecular biology and genetic
engineering. Undergraduates want to study whole systems, so the
few remaining lecturers with this expertise are massively
overworked, while the jobs of the rest are threatened by the lack
of demand for the technology he favours.
Because they cannot persuade us to eat what we are given, many of
Britain>s genetic engineers are turning their attention to
countries in which people have less choice about what or even
when they eat. The biotech companies and their tame scientists
are using other people>s poverty to engineer their own
enrichment. The government is listening. Under Clare Short,
Britain>s department for international development gave £13m to
researchers developing genetically engineered crops for the poor
nations, on the grounds that this will feed the world.
Earlier this year, Aaron deGrassi, a researcher at the Institute
of Development Studies at Sussex University, published an
analysis of the GM crops - cotton, maize and sweet potato - the
biotech companies are developing in Africa. He discovered that
conventional breeding and better ecological management produce
far greater improvements in yields at a fraction of the cost.
"The sweet potato project," he reported, "is now nearing its 12th
year, and involves over 19 scientists ... and an estimated $6m.
In contrast, conventional sweet potato breeding in Uganda was
able in just a few years to develop with a small budget a
well-liked virus-resistant variety with yield gains of nearly
100%." The best improvement the GM sweet potato can produce -
even if we believe the biotech companies' hype - is 18%. But
conventional techniques are of no interest to corporations, as
they cannot be monopolised. If the corporations aren>t
interested, nor is the government.
Those of us who oppose the commercialisation of GM crops have
often been accused of being anti-science, just as opponents of
George Bush are labelled anti-American, and critics of Ariel
Sharon anti-semitic. But nothing threatens science more than the
government departments that distort the research agenda in order
to develop something that we have already rejected. |
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