Taken from the Morning Star (UK daily newspaper of the Left)

Date: Sat 24th May, 2003

Key quote from below: "Most see [GM] as recolonisation conquest and acquisition of their lands and lives not by the sword, but by the patent".

It would be easy to poke fun at the farmers from Kwazula Natal, who are part of the Monsanto road show promoting GM crops as Africa’s salvation.

They have been whisked from their smallholdings, flown in to five-star hotels, given some rudimentary media training, surrounded by Monsanto minders and asked to do the sales pitch.

But these are farmers, not mercenaries. The biotech industry has been using them to play the “race” and development cards in their push for GM acceptance

When Lzarous , Phenious, Richard and Thandiwe spoke, it was from within the limits of their script and their experience – and it was from a background of poverty and exploitation.

Monsanto had supplied them with GM maize and cotton on the promise of higher yields, lower costs and greater earnings. What gets quietly overlooked is the broader politics of biopiracy, sustainability and the battle over who shall own the global food chain.

Let us put some of this into perspective before coming back to the farmers. Britain is due to have its own national debate on the GM issue – though you would hardly notice it. The current farm-scale trials are coming to an end. The European moratorium on commercial growing of GM crops is being challenged by the US government and referred to the WTO disputes panel. The big six biotech companies have ganged up to employ high-powered political lobbyists to "shape" the public debate in favour of GM. Sympathetic journalists are being seeded with stories that are GM-friendly. Most of the arguments used are still bunkum. Nick Cohen, in the Observer, was used to trumpet the virtues of "golden rice" as the answer to child blindness in parts of Asia and Africa. Yet there was no mention that you would have to eat nine kilos of the cooked GM rice per day to get the vitamin A intake to fend off blindness. Nor was there mention either that growing and eating green leaf vegetables was a better way of doing this.

To make this point would have taken you down a path questioning why it is that we insist that the world's poor are asked to feed us before they can feed themselves. Three-quarters of the world's poor live in countries with food surpluses. Their problems stem from a shortage of cash, not a shortage of crops. In last year's drought in Ethiopia, there was a famine in the south of the country while farmers in the north had a bumper crop of cassava. The government didn’t have the cash to buy the crop and feed its own people. The international response was not to send cash but to offload US (GM) grain surpluses. It led to farm closures in the north and reduced prospects of Ethiopia responding to its own food needs. This is what the global food battle is about.

Sustainable food cultures come a poor second to global agribusiness. And global agribusiness is increasingly dependent on GM technologies to give it monopoly control and monopoly profits at the same time as maintaining a dependency on the powerful chemical inputs that it also has monopoly control of. When Lazarous Sibiya was singing the praise of Monsanto's GM maize, he had already accepted the loss of his traditional farmers rights to save seeds from one crop as the basis for the next season's planting. Hereafter, Monsanto would hold the ownership of the seeds and Lazarous would have to pay royalties for their use. He accepted this as the price to be paid for avoiding crop losses caused by the major pest called the stem borer, whose larvae eat their way through around a third of the region's crop.

Farmers in Kenya have discovered a difficult answer to the problem. They plant napier grass between the rows of maize. Stem borers love the grass more than the maize. They also get trapped –and die – in the sticky sap produced by the grass. I asked Lazarous why he didn’t do the same, All that he could say was that he knew nothing of this alternative. Monsanto’s minders tried to say that napier grass wouldn’t grow in this part of Africa, but another agronomist told the meeting that he had been working with the grass for years on exactly the same plain that the farmer lived on. The point of this was not to offer a panacea for crop blight, but to break the presumption that only GM technology can see through today’s food crises. It’s role, in concentrating the ownership of crops, will drive us ever deeper into precisely these crises. That is why our own debate about GM crops has to be in the context of a much wider challenge to food safety and food sustainability. Of course there are GM-specific questions that we must ask. What happens when nature throws up its own response of superweeds, resistant to the herbicides the GM crops depend on?

In Canada and the US, such super weeds have already appeared in the form of multiple herbicide-resistant oil seed rape. In the post-BSE/CJD world, we have to ask what happens when a technology that can cross species barriers also raises the prospect of exposure to illnesses that we have no known resistance to. We have to ask how compatible GM crops are with the phenomenally successful conversion scheme for organic farming.

We need to know why GM is even a relevant response to consumer demands for GM labelling that allows people to avoid buying the stuff.

We also need to know why our own government refuses to bring in a strict “producer liability” Bill to make the biotech industry directly responsible for any damage – to human, animal or environmental health – that comes from the use of GM crops. Across the developing world, where citizens’ juries – of farmers and local communities – have had the chance to assess the claims of GM companies, they have overwhelmingly rejected the sales pitch. Most see it as a form of recolonisation – conquest and acquisition of their lands and lives not by the sword, but by the patent. Most see, too,, that this is not the path out of poverty but into penury. In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, there is a big free-market push to reform agricultural production to boost output – and exports. If sucessful, it will feed the West but pay the poor less, as commodity prices fall in the face of bumper crops.

What is certain is that it will create immediate crises for the 25 million who will be displaced from the land by 2020. Where will they go? Who will feed them? Will their migration be internal or international?

On a smaller scale, the same question faces Poland’s accession to the EU. Its price for entry is agricultural reform that will force two million of the three million Polish farm workers off the land. Poland is already self-sufficient in food. These changes are demanded, not in the name of sustainability – of cultures, food standards, lives or livelihoods – but to meet global corporate demands that would rather devour the future rather than share it.

This is the cynicism behind what will pass for the GM crop debate. If the WTO rules that Europe’s ban on GM organisms is illegal, it still will not persuade Europe’s consumers to buy. The US found this out in their earlier “victory” over beef reared on growth hormones. The US won the judgement, but couldn’t sell the produce.

For GM organisms, they would need to avoid having to label goods. Consumers would then no longer be able to make an informed choice. The bigger prize is, however, the developing world. Biotech companies have made huge profits out of the $100 billion in US farm subsidies. These have principally gone to GM-grain multinationals and left the US with huge surpluses.

African countries have then been arm-locked into accepting this a s food aid – payments going to US corporations – rather than getting cash to pay for domestic solutions.

A green light for GM organisms in Europe would mainly serve as a green light for GM production in the South. Africa will be told to grow GM crops as export earners for hard currency in European markets. The revenues that they raise will pay for corporate royalties, not poverty reduction. The technology will widen the world’s wealth divides. And biotech companies will accelerate the process of patenting the South’s biodiversity.

The US already holds the world’s largest collection of plant germplasm – some 600,000 varities – and the patents taken out on them have earned the biotech industry $5.4 billion in revenues. The more that we drift down this path, the more that we will see the end of public funding for research into nature’s own remedies.

The future will be completely owned and genetically manipulated. It will offer not sustainable solutions, but temporary interludes between self-induced crises. If Monsanto et al buy the consent of the British people to a biotech future for our food system, we will discover that there is wealth gain but not health gain.

In South Africa, Phenious, Lazarous, Richard and Thandiwe will not become any richer, because their profits will disappear in royalty payments and agro-chemical inputs. The ownership of their land, as well as their crops, will pass into corporate hands.

Their only hope of being freed from corporate colonialism is if we demand the same freedom for ourselves – the freedom, with or without WTO approval, to determine our own food future rather than Monsanto’s.