'Terminator' seeds back on corporate agenda

For over a decade, Monsanto and other corporations have reluctantly acknowledged an international moratorium on what are known as “terminator” seeds. These make crops die off after one harvest, forcing farmers to buy new seeds for planting. All that could be about to change as a result of pressure from Brazilian landowners.

A massive movement of farmers and biodiversity groups in the 1990s put Monsanto on the back foot and the corporation froze plans to market terminator seeds. Campaigners pointed out that the seeds could also be used to introduce traits crucial to plant growth, which would be triggered only if proprietary chemicals were applied. Naturally, Monsanto, Syngenta and the other seed corporations would sell those too.

In 2000, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity effectively blocked genetic use restriction technologies, which is the polite term for what many refer to as suicide seeds. Nearly 200 countries signed up to the moratorium. But Monsanto’s lobbyists kept up the pressure.

They found support in Brazil, where major landowners have repeatedly tried to get the government to drop the ban. They failed to have the moratorium lifted in 2007 after the UN Convention reaffirmed its policy. Now landowners have forced the issue back on the agenda of a key Congressional committee where support for allowing the use of terminator seeds is gathering pace.

One of the more bizarre arguments deployed is that the terminator seeds are safer than other genetically-modified products because they allegedly eliminate the risk of contamination of neighbouring land. The landowners want to plant fast growing trees and non-food crops to cash in on the global demand for biofuels. 

The ETC campaign group, which monitors the ecological consequences of new technologies, totally rejects these spurious arguments. It points out that the sterility trait will “inevitably bleed into neighbouring fields and crops meaning that farmers will unwittingly plant seeds that they will never be able to harvest”. A petition signed by tens of thousands of people across Brazil warns that if the law is changed in favour of terminator seeds, it will threaten “farmers and food security and agricultural biodiversity worldwide”.

At the heart of the terminator technology is what ETC describes as “a ground-shifting market strategy”. Suicide seeds can produce anywhere from two to four times the profitability of non-terminator seeds and if introduced would reinforce the stranglehold that a handful of transnationals already have. Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, Dow, Monsanto and DuPont together dominate the seed market as well as the agrochemical market. 

A key judgement in the United States Supreme Court earlier this year reinforced Monsanto’s position while a new European Union draft law will also strengthen the hand of the major corporations. In the US, the court ruled that farmers must pay Monsanto each time they plant its GM soybeans.

Judges rejected the argument of farmer Vernon Bowman that because the company’s herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready soybeans replicate themselves, he was not violating the company’s patent by planting progeny seeds he bought elsewhere. Their ruling was essentially a defence of patent law, which protects corporate products from being copied.

Meanwhile, a draft EU law on plant reproductive material would stop the exchange and distribution of traditional seeds. Ben Raskin, head of horticulture for the Soil Association, warns: “If this regulation is passed, not only will we lose a huge number of plant varieties, we will lose the amazing diversity of appearance, taste, and potential benefits such as disease resistance and nutritional content.”

The effect of the proposal is to introduce a costly licensing system that only the corporations will be able to afford. Now there’s a surprise! From Brazil to Washington and on to Brussels, corporate power has effectively terminated what remains of the democratic process.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Clock is ticking on US debt time bomb

Is America too big to fail? Or will a dysfunctional Congress, by continuing to block a deal on raising the astronomical federal debt ceiling, precipitate a default by the world’s largest economy?

There’s an air of panic. “No clear plan to avoid default as deal collapses”, screams the headline in the Washington Post this morning, with just 48 hours to go before the deadline.

With many government services shut down for nearly three weeks already, it’s small beer compared to what happens if the debt time bomb explodes. In any case, it is already too late to stop the economy unwinding.

There have been several attempts at predicting the sequence of events likely to unfold if Congress cannot come up with a deal, but nobody really knows what might happen. Payments to US war veterans would be amongst the first casualties and they are already on the streets, mounting protests.

For five years, the real conditions in the global economy have been building to a moment that demands something expressive of much greater destructive impact than the “collapse of the house of cards” metaphor widely used for the 2007/8 financial meltdown.

The problem is this: the US needs more debt – an estimated $1.1 trillion to keep paying the interest on the accumulated $16.7 trillion. As with all addictions there has to be a dealer, someone to supply the next fix. Just printing money doesn’t do it.

An increase in debt, and the associated repayments, demands an increase in the value which has to be produced by someone doing productive work, somewhere in the world. And with the US economy not generating enough growth to pay off the debt, exploitation of workers in other countries must also be ramped up.

If you follow the trail of connections to the source of the new value needed to back the debt repayments you find yourself chasing from the factories in China to the murderous conditions in Bangladesh and on to the latest source of cheap labour -Vietnam. 

Which brings us back to the origins of the crisis. During the 1960s and early 1970s the United States was engaged in a losing war in Vietnam. The impossibly high cost of the war contributed to runaway double digit inflation and mounting federal debt. This in turn forced the US to sever the relationship between the dollar and gold which had been the keystone of post second world war economic arrangements The end of the gold standard opened up the period of credit-fuelled expansion, which itself crashed in 2007-8 when the world system came to a griding halt and many banks went belly up.

Nearly 40 years after the end of the Vietnam war finds the US government still making payments to the veterans who fought there. Based on a causal link to the Monsanto-produced defoliant Agent Orange used in Vietnam, federal officials approved diabetes a decade ago as an ailment that qualifies for cash compensation and it’s a large bill. 

Without the ability to borrow more money, the US government cannot pay out to veterans or anyone else. On October 23, a $12bn social security payment is due, and November 1, a range of bills will use up the government’s remaining cash. As some wit put it, by the end of Thursday the US will be like a shopper who has hit his overdraft limit: he cannot borrow more but still has a little cash in his wallet.

The credit rating agencies are moving to further downgrade America’s AAA grade while Citi and other banks have divested themselves of US debt due for payment over the next few weeks. But for China, Japan, the oil exporters – the main holders of US debt – there’s no such luxury. Selling would drive down the dollar further and leave them well out of pocket.

The House of Representatives is hostage to the far right Tea Party faction and seems determined to go to the brink. President Obama could ignore Congress and raise the debt ceiling himself, but that would provoke a major constitutional crisis.

Whichever way you look at, American capitalism is being blown apart by its addiction to debt. And the rest of the global economy is not too far behind. 

Gerry Gold

Economics editor 

For a world without the WTO and 'free trade agreements'

From the supermarkets that dominate food sales, through distribution systems, to agriculture and its increasing dependence on chemicals and back down the chain to gene research, the story is one of the concentration of power in fewer and fewer corporations.

By 2011, as this report shows, the world’s top 10 seed companies controlled three quarters (75%) of the market for their products. The same six global corporations

control 75% of all private sector plant breeding research; 60% of the commercial seed market and 76% of global agrochemical sales. Some also have links to animal pharmaceuticals.

For the authors, the ETC Group, “this creates a vulnerability in the world food system” not seen since the founding of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in 1945.

No one is anyone any longer much surprised by the destructive impacts of the competitive pursuit of profits on people’s lives and on the ecological systems that we depend upon. As the ETC point out:

“The agro-industrial farming system has been spectacularly successful at encouraging uniformity, destroying diversity, polluting soil and water, corroding human health and impoverishing farm labour”

In its 2013  report, Cost of Inaction, the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that, for smallholder farmers in 37 sub-Saharan African countries, the costs of pesticide poisonings (lost work days, outpatient medical treatment, and inpatient hospitalisation) amounted to $4.4 billion in 2005 (not including the cost of lost lives and livelihoods, environmental health effects and effects of other chemicals).

UNEP projects the total cost of pesticide-related illness and injury in sub-Saharan Africa between 2005 and 2020 could reach a staggering $90 billion.

You might even laugh out loud in a kind of helpless desperation at the latest antics of the big pesticide producers Bayer and Monsanto whose products are designed to kill insects. Bayer produces neonicotinoid-based chemicals which scientific studies show to be implicated in the massive die-off of the bees which all of humanity depends on to pollinate the crops we eat.

In an attempt to fend off any extension - and even reverse - the new European Union ban on neonicotinoids, Bayer has embarked on a rebranding exercise, presenting itself as a promoter of bee-health. Monsanto, the world’s number one seed producer, and manufacturer of killer chemical Roundup, goes a step further. It has bought Beeologics, an R&D company providing targeted control of pests and diseases. Its mission is “to become the guardian of bee health worldwide.” LOL.

But it’s not all bad news. Corporate control of the food chain is very far from being a completed process. There’s still time to end it.

The vast majority of farmers - peasant farmers who continue to feed 70% of the world’s population –  are not tied to the corporate food chain. And the majority of the world’s meat and milk is still produced by small-scale farmers in mixed crop-and-livestock systems, rather than the new profit–led systems of industrialised intensive production.

La Via Campesina, representing the interests of small, peasant farmers worldwide, puts forward its proposals to coincide with the latest meeting of the World Trade Organisation now underway in Bali. 

“We are living a global emergency situation, greater than any that we have lived, and intellectual property rights for profit should not have precedence over nature and humanity. Trade is needed but a different kind of trade, one that is not based on the exploitation of people and nature and whose rules benefit the communities and not the corporations.

“The kind of trade we need is complementary and equitable trade not corporate free trade. To really address the climate crisis, a world without the WTO and the FTAs [free trade agreements], one that is not dominated by transnational corporations and the global free trade regimes, is necessary!

“We have to change the system, and we have to do this now.”

What more can you say?

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

GM crops: bad science, big profits

You would think that someone holding the post of environment secretary would actually have concerns about, well, the environment. Such is our topsy-turvy world, however, that the opposite is true when it comes to Owen Paterson.

The free marketeer ConDem environment secretary, is a climate change sceptic despite mountains of evidence (as well as casual observation of increasingly erratic weather patterns) to the contrary. No concern for the environment there.

Now Paterson is launching a campaign to get the European Union to dump its ban on genetically-modified (GM) crops that have caused severe problems around the world. Still no concern for the environment, although plenty for the GM corporations.

If the EU does not drop its policy, Paterson wants the United Kingdom to go it alone. He says the government has "a duty to the British public to reassure them GM is a safe, proven and beneficial innovation".

Those are certainly big claims - almost as big as the giant ragweed strangling corn crops in farms across the United States. US farmers are finding that after four or five years growing Monstanto's Round-up ready corn, weeds develop resistance. Up to 15 million acres of crops are now affected.

The farmers must then switch to a different herbicide, and therefore a different GM seed. Monsanto competitor Dow has produced a one with resistance to 2,4-D. This is one of the two components of Agent Orange, the defoliant the US army sprayed on crops and forest during the Vietnam war.

However, we are assured that it is not the component that caused the birth defects – just the one that stripped the land bare. So that’s alright then.

Which brings us to the tiny rootworm, which prevents corn from absorbing water and nutrients from the soil and leaves corps in ruins. The US Environmental Protection Agency reports rootworms have been found in Illinois and Iowa that are resistant to the Bt gene bred into Monsanto seed corn.

Insecticide sales are surging after years of decline, and profits are up. Farmers who already paid through the nose for supposedly resistant GM seed are now buying pesticide to kill the rootworm. Dow/Monsanto competitor Syngenta is cashing in with pesticide sales doubling in 2012.

Pesticides are bad for farmers' health, water supplies and the health of whole populations. As well as killing the rootworm, they wipe out beneficial insects, including bees.

Whilst GM makes lots of money for corporations, it doesn't work in the long term. A herbicide will kill weeds for a time, but eventually a rogue gene will appear that has resistance. That weed will survive spraying, and spread. It will have adapted.

The claims made for GM are based on bad biology, bad botany, bad genetics –  just bad science really. Bad science but big profits, and Paterson doesn't want corporate farmers and the agri-chemical companies missing out on the European market.

He even stooped so low as to repeat the claim that GM is the answer to world hunger. But if the problems faced by US farmers were repeated across the globe the effect would be disastrous.

Soil Association policy director Peter Melchett says GM will make it harder, not easier, to feed the world. "In fact GM is the cuckoo in the nest. It drives out and destroys the systems that international scientists agree we need to feed the world.”

Systems like the one practised by Suman Kumar, who holds the world record for rice yield on his one-acre plot in Bihar in northern India. He achieved 22.4 tons per hectare, where big rice farmers get on average 8 tons.

Kumar and his neighbours are achieving these great yields using a modest amount of inorganic fertiliser and no pesticides or herbicides. They are working with the System of Rice Intensification, where instead of focusing on killing pests and force-feeding, all the effort goes into creating the best possible conditions for the rice plants to flourish.  

As Melchett concludes: "We need farming that helps poorer African and Asian farmers produce food, not farming that helps Bayer, Syngenta and Monsanto produce profits."

A revolution in farming on that scale will require a revolution on a political and economic scale too.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

EU-US trade deal threat to food safety

The launch of EU-US negotiations on a new trade deal should set alarm bells ringing for food producers and consumers throughout Europe. If successful the deal will sweep away environmental, health, privacy and cultural standards.

For decades, these have given a measure of protection to the European food industry from incursion by the predominantly US-based global agri-business corporations.

The talks are intended to promote growth by eliminating all trade tariffs and “harmonising” regulations which act as barriers to trade. The G8 announcement of the July 8 start of talks sees the two parties aiming to sign the deal by the end of 2014.

The launch of the new deal – a second-best attempt at the failed World Trade Organisation’s Doha trade talks – will be seen as a direct response to the mounting anger against profit-driven food production manifested in the two million strong worldwide march against Monsanto in hundreds of cities in 52 countries last month.

The ConDem government, in a coalition with lobbyists for the biotech companies, is spearheading the corporations’ campaign.

Britain’s science minister, David Willetts and environment secretary Owen Paterson are pushing for EU controls on new genetically-modified crops and food to be relaxed. Willetts, who has been heavily lobbied by GM campaigners and scientists funded by the GM industry, insists biotech crops could feed the world.

Eight European governments have banned cultivation of a Monsanto GM maize called MON 810, which is genetically modified to kill pests which feed on it, on the basis it might cause harm to other important insects. The eight are Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg and most recently Poland, while Italy said it plans to follow suit.

As a result, Monsanto says it has effectively given up on lobbying for approval for new GM crops to be grown in Europe, though it is certain to be active in the negotiations for the new bilateral deal.

The ban on the maize and other forms of GM has been made under an EU environmental protection provision known as the “Safeguard Clause”. Even so large quantities of GM soya and maize are imported into Europe, including Britain, entering the food chain as animal feed.  

Monsanto’s bid for domination of the global food chain received a major setback in May, when Japan and parts of South Korea banned US wheat imports after the discovery of a unlicensed genetically-modified crop growing in Oregon. The corporation is now facing a class action lawsuit from farmers in the state.

The company is, however, celebrating its defence of patents – intellectual copyright controls over food - in a court victory against farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman. Having bought Roundup-ready soybean seeds, he had the temerity and ingenuity to find a way, he thought, of bypassing the company’s patent. This would have allowed him to reinstate ancient farming practices and replant the seed he’d grown. No such luck.

But no court action, worldwide protests, nor import bans will be sufficient to stop Monsanto in its tracks. Monsanto, producer of the infamous Roundup herbicide, has been in this sordid business for decades, originally with its manufacture of PCBs and Agent Orange, as well as Bovine Growth Hormone, banned in Europe.

Since 2011 it has been advising US farmers to engage in an arms race to protect their crops, using a cocktail of their pesticides when Roundup resistant “superweed” mutants developed and infested millions of acres of farmland.   

Meanwhile radical alternatives are beginning to emerge. Following a showing of the World According to Monsanto film in a quiet rural Welsh pub, organised by the local Transition Town group, the audience, including farmers, unanimously voted for a proposal to set up a country-wide, not-for-profit seed co-operative. It’s the way to go!

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

How the public good became Monsanto's private gain

Agrichemical companies like Monsanto are pursuing hundreds of US farmers and farm companies through the courts, suing them for millions of dollars for infringement of seed patents. It’s a result of the wholesale transfer of crop varieties to the corporations.

By the end of 2012, Monsanto had pocketed £23.5 million from court judgments, but that amount is nothing to the hundreds of millions they and other chemical corporations have got in confidential out-of-court settlements.

The Centre for Food Safety and Save our Seeds have exposed the shocking story of how neo-conservatives in the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court facilitated the transfer of crop varieties from freely available goods to ruthlessly-controlled private property.

Up to the early 1980s, publicly-funded scientists working in the universities or the Department of Agriculture developed most new crop varieties. "In 1980, the share of overall US crop acreage planted with public sector seed was 70% for soybeans and 72-85% for various types of wheat," their report explains.

Public scientists developed the process of hybridization, including the first high-yielding hybrid corn varieties. But hybridised seed doesn't grow true from saved seed, so farmers must buy new each year to retain the in-bred characteristics. Enter the agricorporations. Already producing herbicides and pesticides, they saw the opportunity for big profits and moved into crop breeding.

For 200 years, Congress had resisted pressure to authorise patents on staple food crops. Then in the 1980s, as globalisation took off, chemical corporations were handed control of US agriculture as part of a process whereby ALL America's public assets were being transferred into the hands of profit-driven corporations.

New intellectual property regulations and policies allowed the corporations to stampede through hundreds of patents for genetic materials and plants. These were altered hardly at all from the existing varieties developed using public money.

Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Dow implemented a ruthless programme of mergers and acquisitions, buying up small to medium-sized state-based firms. These mostly bred seed for their local conditions but that work has been swallowed up by the one-size fits all (or else) approach.

The report debunks claims that patents are needed for the corporations to invest in research and development: "The vast majority of plant improvement in American history has been accomplished by farmers and public sector plant breeders, and these tremendous advances were made without any system of ‘innovation-promoting’ intellectual property protection for plants."

In effect the US government and judiciary have colluded with the corporations to "enshrine corporate interests instead of safeguarding farmers and small, independent businesses", the report concludes. This privatisation and monopolisation of products of nature is "contrary to centuries of traditional seed breeding based on collective community knowledge and established in the public domain and for the public good."

And it also endangers the future of food supplies. Monsanto's giant "success story" is breeding crops resistant to repeated applications of Round-Up weed killer. Now agronomists are warning of an epidemic of weeds that have also evolved resistance to glyphosate. Nearly 61.2 million acres of US farmland was infested with these resistant weeds in 2012.

Seed produced by the corporations so dominates the market that it is virtually impossible to find commercial varieties that do not contain patented genetic markers. And many varieties that could have helped to resolve new problems have disappeared. That's why farmers, seed “washers” (who prepare saved seed for planting) and farming companies cannot escape the clutches of the corporations.

The privatisation and commercialisation of the commons means food supply is predominantly in the hands of profit-hungry corporations who will stamp out independent agriculture and production where they can. Liberating ourselves from the likes of Monsanto and Dow Chemicals is an absolute priority not just for farmers but for the whole of humanity.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Drought is good - for Monsanto's profits, that is

The drive to put the chemical industry totally in control of agriculture is resulting in record profits for agri-chemical giant Monsanto and record droughts last year for the United States, Brazil and other parts of South America.

Hang on – isn’t it a bit tenuous to directly connect the one to the other, the profits to the drought? Well, the global corporations and their servile governments would say so, but if you unpick the relationship it is clear enough.

Monsanto’s earnings in the three months to November 2012 were $339 billion, up from $126 billion the previous year, that’s two and a half times greater. This resulted from a 27% increase in sales of genetically modified corn seeds, mainly to farmers in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, and of pesticides, particularly the weed killer Roundup.

It is axiomatic that if Monsanto sells more GM corn seed it will sell more Roundup, because the main characteristic of GM corn is that it “Roundup ready” and can tolerate repeated applications. It’s a deadly symbiotic relationship that is polluting land and water supply throughout the world.

Of course, all this intensive cropping needs more fertiliser. Since 1990, consumption of fertiliser in Brazil has increased by 7% every single year and in China and India by 5%.

This intensive style of agriculture abuses the soil by forcing it to produce more than it is organically able to. As the soil become impoverished, more and more fertiliser and pesticides are applied. As the markets for grain increase, more and more land is drawn into this cycle of degradation.

Over the past five decades, global arable land increased by 67 million hectares, much of it from cleared forests or scrub, transforming carbon sinks into carbon emitters.

Why do we need these vast quantities of grain and oil crops? It is not for food, but to service the expansion of the highly profitable (deeply unhealthy) meat diet from the developed capitalist economies to the rest of the world. And it is also to expand into the highly profitable (and subsidised by us) bioethanol market.

The global industrialised food system is responsible for one-third of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a partnership of 15 research centres around the world. And agriculture is responsible for 86% of that, closely followed by fertiliser manufacture and refrigeration.

Last year was the hottest in US history (as far back as the records go) with more than 62% of the land mass suffering some level of drought. The drought has continued into winter and next year’s early wheat may not germinate. There have been wildfires in December.

In north-eastern Brazil, cattle are dying in thousands and farmers are reduced to feeding them cactus. The drought threatens power cuts in big cities like Salvador and Recife, as the water falls below the levels where hydro-electric power stations can function.

But Monsanto’s US order book is reported to be extremely healthy. The drought has made American farmers fear a seed shortage so they are getting their orders in early. Monsanto’s scientists are working flat out on “drought-resistant” seed – so they can profit further from the climate crisis they helped create.

This is entirely in line with the logic of a system that

- squanders billions of tons of animal, including human, waste instead of composting it into organic fertiliser

- feeds protein and carbohydrate to cattle while humans starve

- clears rainforest to grow palm to make bioethanol, and calls it “tackling climate change”

- adds to greenhouse gas emissions by transporting food thousands of miles from places where people are starving, to places where they are dying from obesity-related diseases.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Monsanto targets Mexican maize in bioethanol push

On a visit to one of Glasgow’s B&Q stores, alongside the electric and gas fires, I noticed modern looking glass and metal bioethanol burners, quite cheap and offering a “living flame”. Clearly, bioethanol has entered the mainstream.

It is made from a variety of food crops, depending where you are. In the US it is maize (sweet corn) and in Europe it’s wheat or barley. In Brazil, the world’s largest user and producer of bioethanol, it is sugar cane.

This is produced using an industrial agriculture system. Since the start of the 1980s, bioethanol production has cleared huge areas of virgin forest and savannah, creating vast machine-managed fields.

It has contributed to dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and the loss of biodiversity is almost unbearable to contemplate. Vast quantities of fertiliser and water are used.

Small farmers and hunter-gatherers lost their livelihoods. With machines doing the work, they were pushed into the slums round Brazil’s cities. The only sustainable thing about this business is the profits of the global corporations and local energy businesses like Petrobras.  

The US is also expanding bioethanol but this year, the maize crop was hard hit by a heat wave. Still, 40% of it will go for biofuel - 5 billion bushels of edible corn turned into 13.5 billion gallons of fuel.

Genetically engineered (GE) corn is the norm in the US. As the north American market demands more imports from Latin America, corporations like Monsanto and Cargill are going all out to force countries there to accept GE.

A new report from GRAIN, which supports the rights of small farmers, says the GE corporations are “bearing down on Latin America with a force recalling their initial assault under the banner of the ‘green revolution’ in the 1960s”. Grain says:

Nearly every country in the region is in the sights of the agribusiness transnationals, the most recent example being Paraguay, where a parliamentary coup d’état took as one of its goals that of gaining approval for GE maize – and the de facto government is now preparing to grant that approval. In Argentina, Monsanto wants to build the largest GE maize processing plant in Latin America; the government is set to amend the Seeds Act to adapt it to that company’s needs. In the Andean region, there are worrisome attempts to overturn the bans on GMOs in Bolivia and Ecuador using bogus arguments. In Costa Rica, too, the Biosafety Commission intends to approve a GE maize variety.

Mexico is their biggest priority and in September, Monsanto applied for permits to plant 700,000 hectares of GE maize in Sinaloa province. The larger Mexican farmers and farm companies have already been softened up to accept this.

They were cut out of the supply chain for the last two years because their prices were “too high”. They already buy seed from the multinationals. All the corporations have to do is to cut off the supply of traditional seed and make only GE available.

Small farmers planting traditional varieties on family subsistence farms fear their maize will become contaminated with GE. This is of international importance because Mexico is the genetic cradle of maize, with many varieties grown. It would only take one pest or disease to arise in the GE variety and maize could cease to exist as a food crop.

So there you go – it seems a long journey from a B&Q in Darnley to Mexican farmers defending maize diversity on behalf of us all. In today’s globalised economy, these are the interconnections you encounter every day.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Save the bees from corporate greed

Two crucial scientific studies have confirmed that pesticides and insecticides at even low, undetectable levels are linked to the massive collapse of honey bee colonies.

Chemical firm Bayer, which produces the nicotine-based imidacloprid, has always dismissed any connection between the use of its insecticide and the disappearance of bee colonies in the United States and Europe.

But from the University of Maryland, we learn that sub-lethal doses of imidacloprid weaken bees, so that they lose their immunity to a common parasite Nosema.

Though the doses were not high enough to affect longevity or the ability to forage, the increase in the Nosema parasite infestation shows that even undetectable levels of the pesticide affect the immune system of bees.

The researchers conclude that interactions between pesticides and pathogens like Nosema, "could be a major contributor to increased mortality of honey bee colonies, including colony collapse disorder, and other pollinator declines worldwide."

Scientists at the University of Purdue, Indiana, analysed bees found dead in and around hives from several apiaries over two years and discovered the presence of neonicotinoid insecticides in all of them. These products are used to coat corn and soybean seeds before planting.

They were present on nearby dandelion flowers up to two years after treated seed was planted and in corn pollen gathered by bees.

"We know that these insecticides are highly toxic to bees; we found them in each sample of dead and dying bees," said Christian Krupke, associate professor of entomology and a co-author of the findings.

Other bees at the affected hives exhibited tremors, uncoordinated movement and convulsions, all signs of insecticide poisoning.

All corn seed and about half of all soybean seed planted in the US is coated with the sticky insecticide, and to keep the seed flowing freely in the planters, it is mixed with talc.

"Given the rates of corn planting and talc usage, we are blowing large amounts of contaminated talc into the environment," Krupke said. "This material is so concentrated that even small amounts landing on flowering plants around a field can kill foragers or be transported to the hive in contaminated pollen."

Bees that do not die directly as a result of the insecticide suffer other effects, such as loss of homing ability or lowered resistance to disease or mites. In other words, bee colony collapse is due to multiple problems, but it is likely that the loss of resistance to viruses, mites and parasites is itself connected to the use of these deadly chemicals.

(And while we are on the subject - what is the cumulative effect on human beings eating food grown in this way? It can't possibly have no effect. Perhaps we should be told.)

Late last year, Monsanto (inventor of the neonicotinoids and many other deadly agro-industrial weapons) bought up one of the key companies looking at genetic modification of honey bees to survive colony collapse.

Beeologics, based in Florida and Israel, has developed a product called Remembee, an anti-viral agent that works by interfering with the bees' DNA, its genetic make-up.

Kelly Powers, a Monsanto PR person, said at the time, without a trace of irony: "I don't need to tell you how important bees are to farmers who rely on pollination, and Remembee has great promise, pending approvals."

First they create the chemicals that harm the bees - then they manipulate their genes to resist some effects of the poison. And at every point - big fat profits!

If anything requires genetic modification, it’s corporations like Monsanto and Bayer, for the sake of the eco-system as a whole. The consequences of a world without pollinating bees are too shocking to contemplate.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Liberate science to tackle world hunger

Growing enough food to feed the world’s population is already achieved, though poor people often can’t access or afford it and rich countries waste as much as 30%.

The fact that population growth will peak in around 2050 means that it should be possible to produce sufficient food, provided there is a transformation to more sustainable farming and land use. And provided, of course, that there is a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions and global warming is capped and then reversed.

The scientific journal Nature, in a special issue on food and farming, concludes: “Producing enough food for the world's population in 2050 will be easy. But doing it at an acceptable cost to the planet will depend on research into everything from high-tech seeds to low-tech farming practices.” Nature calls for a “second green revolution” and says:

Such a revolution will require a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research. There is an urgent need for new crop varieties that offer higher yields but use less water, fertilizers or other inputs — created, for example, through long-neglected research on modifying roots — and for crops that are more resistant to drought, heat, submersion and pests. Equally crucial is lower-tech research into basics such as crop rotation, mixed farming of animals and plants on smallholder farms, soil management and curbing waste. (Between one-quarter and one-third of the food produced worldwide is lost or spoiled.)

But the call for “a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research” is a big demand. Public investment in agricultural research has collapsed and the only investors are profit-driven corporations like Monsanto and Du Pont. It is certainly not possible to feed the world with the current profit-driven, smash-and-grab approach of global agri-business.

Far from transforming the way land is used, transnationals are buying it up for intensive industrialised use. Even marginal land that will be entirely destroyed by two or three seasons of chemical-driven agriculture is being grabbed. Genetic modification in the hands of corporations continues to produce unforeseen outcomes that leave the profits of the transnationals intact but leave farmers duped – or forced – into planting GM seed – bankrupt.

The Chinese government is investing in research, but in a reckless and uncontrolled way. From “cloud-seeding” to GM seeds, China is carrying out a massive experiment on its land and people. It has emerged that companies that are part-owned by the state agriculture research institutes where the seeds were developed, have sold genetically modified rice seed to Chinese farming corporations. The relevant safety certificates were never issued.

The reality is that capitalism’s only response to this contemporary set of challenges has been a dramatic increase in market speculation in food and land. New investment funds are being established to profit from the global land grab, with Morgan Stanley to the fore.

And a further devastating price spike is on the horizon as thousands of hectares of grain crops in Punjab – Pakistan’s “bread basket” –have been swept away by the floods, whilst the wheat crop in Russia and Ukraine has been devastated by unprecedented drought. The UN has called for calm, as the world market price for wheat surged – by 7% on one day last week – on forecasts that 25m tonnes has been lost from the global harvest.

It is often said that people have lost confidence in science and its ability to make the world a better place. But it is the economic and political system within which science functions that is untrustworthy. Already thousands of scientists are working on responses to global warming, often in institutions that receive little or no funding.

Released from the need to focus on increased profits by their funding masters, science could contribute not only to feeding the world, but also to transforming agriculture into an activity that works in harmony with the evolutionary biology of plants and people.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

India's farmers resist GM

The Coalition for a GM-free India, representing hundreds of farmers’ unions, environmental and women’s organisations and organic farming groups from 15 Indian states, this week marched in Delhi against the sale and distribution of genetically-modified (GM) crops and seeds. In particular, they are opposed to an experimental type of Bt brinjal (aubergine) recently approved for large-scale field trials.

Bt - Bacillus thuringiensis - is a naturally occurring bacteria that produces a protein toxic to certain types of insects. The gene that produces the toxin - the Bt gene - can be transferred to seeds, making them more resistant to that insect. There are two major problems with this approach. Firstly, whilst it may reduce the impact of one pest, it can open the door to others. Instead of reducing reliance on fertilisers, farmers will have to pay for the expensive GM seed AND for insecticides to tackle other pests.

Secondly, experts worry that such crops may evoke natural selection and a proliferation of mutant insects resistant to Bt. The natural Bt bacterium is a crucial insecticide in organic farming. Insects with resistance would threaten the future of organic farming. GM crops can also have indirect environmental effects, by changing traditional land management practices that are in reality more sustainable.

When Indian farmers were coerced into using GM cotton, they were plagued by different, and increased numbers, of pests and diseases; deaths of livestock grazed on cotton fields and reports of allergic reactions in humans – and all with no increase in yields whatsoever. In spite of these disasters, the government continues to allow the agri-corporations to use India as a testing ground. Now Mahyco, the Indian branch of Monsanto, plans to start large-scale trials of Bt brinjal from June this year. Also being tested is a Bt okra plant which campaigners claim was planted in breach of environmental regulations for the oversight of trials.

Alongside their activities in India, the agri-corporations are tied in with the aid arm of the US government (USAid) in a project to transform Africa into the biggest GM testing ground of all. Tempting governments with “Trojan horse crops” such as a GM sweet potato in Kenya and a GM potato in Egypt, the corporations have enticed African governments to drop their opposition. As in India, it is ordinary farmers – for example in Mali – who are leading the resistance, unimpressed by claims that GM is the answer to hunger in Africa.

And these claims – now rising to a clamour in response to the capitalist-engineered food crisis – persist, even though new studies clearly show that GM crops actually CUT productivity. A three-year research project by the University of Kansas found that GM soya produces about 10% less food than its conventional equivalent. The outcomes with GM cotton are the same, with lower yields not only in India and China but also in the US.

Last month, the results of a painstaking examination of global agriculture gave no support to GM crops. In a 110-page report released by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), 400 of the world’s leading scientist explored how agriculture can be reinvented to meet population growth, climate change and the growing food crisis. They conclude that industrial, large-scale agriculture is unsustainable, and that traditional systems that produce food whilst sustaining clean water and preserving biodiversity are more likely to improve the lives of poor people. Not surprisingly, Syngenta and other biotech and pesticide companies pulled out of this assessment process.

A recent report highlighted on the AWTW website says that about 200,000 small farmers in India have killed themselves in the last 12 years and the highest number of suicides were in the state of Maharashtra. The report calls it “the graveyard of farmers today”. And that is where the Bt brinjal trials will be located.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Coming to a field near you: Zombie and Exorcist seeds

A new crop of genetic engineering technologies are being promoted as a solution to the unwanted spread of transgenes from genetically-modified (GM) plants. In practice, these technologies will allow the transnationals to tighten their grip on proprietary seeds and further restrict the rights of farmers. The European Union is pushing one project forward, despite opposition from its own parliament and other groups who reject what is known as ‘terminator’ technology. These are seeds developed by biotech corporations that have built-in destruction after one application. The ETC Group, which promotes agricultural diversity and human rights, is warning in a new report Terminator: the Sequel about the implications of the EU’s “transcontainer” project. This is aimed at developing GM crops and trees for Europe that could be "biologically contained" through "reversible transgenic sterility." ETC’s Hope Shand says: “We've always known that terminator technology is simply too lucrative for the seed industry to abandon but it's outrageous that the European Union is using public funds to develop genetic seed sterilisation." ETC rejects the claim that the transcontainer project’s aim is not to restrict seed use but to contain transgenes, and that the technology under development differs from terminator because the seeds' sterility will be "reversible"- most likely through the application of a chemical. ETC Group dubs these “Zombie seeds” which would create a scenario in which farmers would have to pay for a chemical to restore seed viability.

If you thought “zombie seeds” were bad news, you haven’t heard of new research on gene excision technologies. Molecular methods are used to snip out transgenes at some point in a plant's life. Dubbed Exorcist by ETC, the excision process can be triggered by an external environmental or chemical stimulus, or it can be designed to occur automatically at a particular stage in the plant's life. ETC’s Kathy Jo Wetter explains: "In its current state, Exorcist is far from a failsafe biocontainment strategy - it won't work 100% of the time - but even if Exorcist can't fully contain transgenes, it could still function as a biological method to enforce patents by restricting access to proprietary traits." And there are "extreme" biocontainment methods - molecular methods involving "conditionally lethal genes" capable of terminating plants and their transgenic DNA in the event that other containment strategies fail.

The strategy of the biotech corporations like Monsanto is clear. They want to convince governments and the public that biological containment of genetically-modified organisms is possible using one of these new techniques - or a combination of them. It would then open the floodgates to new markets for biotech plants, particularly GM crops and trees grown for biofuels. The result will be a drastically increased risk of transgenic contamination. What the ETC investigation demonstrates is that as soon as one door is closed on the corporations, another one opens, facilitated by the actions of the EU and other pro-market states. The ETC advocates better regulation and governance as a way of halting this process. This is a laudable but, quite frankly, hopeless ambition. The corporations rule the planet and only a massive social transformation of capitalist society is going to put an end to that.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

Corporate threat to farm-saved seeds

The handful of corporations that dominate the world seed industry are gearing up to remove remaining loopholes in the plant variety protection system, which was the alternative to patenting that they set up in the 1960s. European-based firms want to get rid of farmers’ limited entitlement to save seed. The Americans want to restrict the exemption by which breeders have the free use of each other’s commercial varieties for research purposes. In both cases, the point is to reduce competition and boost profits, according to GRAIN, which campaigns for biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge. Despite pressure from the transnational corporations, at least two-thirds of the global crop area is currently planted with farm-saved seed every year. In many developing countries, it represents 80-90% of all seed used. GRAIN warns that If farmers were legally forced to plant all of this area with commercial seed, it could easily mean a doubling of seed industry turnover, that is, an "extra $20 billion annually - all taken out of farmers' pockets and delivered to giants such as DuPont, Bayer, Syngenta, and Monsanto".

In many countries, seed laws already require farmers to use only certified seed of government-approved varieties. That seed is often available only from commercial seed companies. A rapidly increasing number of governments also grant legal monopoly rights for commercial seed, by means of industrial patents and so-called plant variety protection (PVP). Some developing countries have been persuaded to join the international PVP system. But this gives seed companies a monopoly on only the commercial multiplication and the marketing of seeds. Farmers have remained free to save seed from their own harvest to plant in the following year. Now the seed manufacturers want the monopoly that biotech firms like Monsanto have enjoyed through industrial patents on plants bred with genetic engineering (GE) and related techniques. These prevent farmers from saving seeds.

Another key industry demand will be to restrict or eliminate the freedom to use PVP-protected varieties for breeding. Says Grain: "The purpose is simply to block competition. If nobody else is allowed to improve on a variety until after the term of protection - 20 years or so - a seed company will be able to sell the unimproved variety for a much longer period, and postpone the cost of new research. The net effect: increased profits for the PVP owner, higher seed prices and fewer new varieties for farmers." GRAIN points out that monopolisation leads to fewer and fewer products of value to farmers. Major advance in yield and resistance improvement were made early in the 20th century, before any monopoly rights were available on seeds, it points out. Those improvements came mainly from selecting and crossing thousands of farmer varieties developed over centuries, not from any industry-sponsored research. The emergence of capitalism in the 18th century was marked by the enclosure of common land and clearances, by which people were driven out of the countryside into the towns. The growing corporate stranglehold over food systems that is revealed by organisations like GRAIN amounts to the enclosure of the global commons.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

GM is now a global battlefield

The struggle between the biotechnology companies who try to ram genetically-modified (GM) crops and food down the throats of farmers and consumers is now being fought out on a global scale. And biotech corporations like Monsanto are not having it all their way own way. A summary of global reaction against GM in 2006, released by Greenpeace International, provides evidence of growing resistance in many countries. "There is irrefutable evidence that governments, farmers and consumers throughout the world recognise that genetic engineering is unreliable, unviable or downright dangerous," said Jeremy Tager of Greenpeace International. Some countries are banning GM altogether. Rumania, for instance, which had 85,000 hectares planted with GM soy in 2005, will drop to zero this year, in keeping with a new government policy banning its cultivation. Farmers in India, France and the Philippines have led the way with protests, uprooting crops and holding demonstrations. There is even a backlash in the United States, where most GM crops are concentrated, following the Bayer LL601 rice contamination scandal. Californian rice producers and a major rice mill in the state, Sunwest Foods, have called for a ban on any cultivation of GM rice, including field trials. Producers and traders lost out massively when the contamination was exposed. Meanwhile, in 2006, the number of regions in the EU declaring themselves GM-free zones went up to 172 and 4,500 local authorities say they want to avoid using GM products.

Herbicide-tolerant crops are engineered to survive the application of a powerful herbicide that would kill a non-engineered crop, making it easier for farmers to use more herbicide to control nearby weeds. Or so the claim goes. The reality is different. Studies by independent scientists demonstrate that GM crop yields are lower than, or at best equivalent to, yields from non-GM varieties. Reduced yields have in particular been found with Roundup Ready (RR) soy. An independent study of US government statistics shows that the three major GM crops have led to a 122 million pound increase in pesticide use since 1996. Until the widespread adoption of RR crops, there were just two confirmed cases of glyphosate-resistant weeds. But by 2005, many different weeds had become resistant in the United States. The International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications (ISAAA), an industry-funded body, ignores all this and paints a rosy picture of inevitable success. In its January 2006 report, ISAAA claimed that "the continuing rapid adoption of biotech crops reflects the substantial and consistent improvements in productivity, the environment, economics, and social benefits realised by both large and small farmers, consumers and society". This kind of nonsense is par for the course and is constantly exposed by organisations like GM Watch. This organisation reveals how the biotech industry funds spurious "scientific" research and underhand lobbying to promote GM as absolutely safe and the answer to world hunger (GM Watch also includes a revealing dossier on the dubious ex-Living Marxism group, whose members have with amazing ease penetrated top levels in the media to promote right-wing, libertarian views that often coincide with those of the biotech corporations). Curiously enough, The GM Watch site has been down recently and its staff think it might have been the victim of a malicious attack. Working out a list of suspects shouldn’t take too long. Send your suggestions to info@gmwatch.org.


Paul Feldman, communications editor