Protestors say No to GMOs
Photo: Michael Fox
July 2004
Reclaim the Commons
The Battle over Biotech
by David Kupfer
As I bike from the Powell BART station to the Moscone Center, I encounter more riot cops in one place than I’ve seen since November 30, 1999, in downtown Seattle’s epic WTO drama. This show of force is there to greet hundreds of festive “Reclaim the Commons” protesters who want to disrupt BIO 2004 — the world’s largest biotechnology industry trade show. Inside Moscone’s cavernous halls, more than 1,400 exhibits occupied 400,000-square-feet of floor-space while 902 speakers and 275 companies competed for the attention of 16,000 attendees from 61 countries.
At Fourth and Howard, black-suited scientists bustle past young eco-activists, and suave venture capitalists encounter young women offering flowers and placards reading: “Our genes are not for sale. Biotech = Biohazard.” Susan Sullivan, co-coordinator of the Butte County anti-GMO campaign, is using colored chalk to turn the pavement into a spontaneous art happening while a phalanx of SF’s finest looks on.
Chatting up the cops, I learn that street-dancing protesters have held this intersection for the last 80 minutes. Earlier, 15 people locked themselves together at the intersection singing: “Reclaim the Commons! Take it back! Seeds will grow when the Empire cracks!” The police begin confiscating plants placed to “green” the intersection and, for a moment, it looks like an SFPD Lawn and Garden Show. Several activists crawl under the front axle of a bus carrying conferees, immobilizing it. Others block the bus with bicycles. Traffic is now blocked all the way to the Bay Bridge.
I greet author/permaculturalist Starhawk, a veteran of countless progressive movements and a protest organizer. She explains how biotech firms seek to control the commons. “By ‘commons,’ we mean our plant and animal heritages, our life support systems, our very genes, our economy and our environment.” With a defiant shake of her mane of auburn hair, Starhawk elaborates: “The biotechnology industry is a prime example of how global corporations are eroding democracy, threatening our health and environment, and concentrating control of our food and resources in the hands of a few profit-driven companies. With almost no public debate, over 100-million acres of genetically engineered (GE) crops are planted each year in the United States.”
Evidence suggests that genetic tinkering may introduce new allergens and toxins into food. GE crops often boost pesticide use, harming beneficial insects, earthworms, and birds. And genetic contamination from GE crops threatens both conventional and organic farming, as evidenced by Percy Schmeiser’s battle with Monsanto (see page 10).
The demonstrators’ demands are spelled out on hundreds of placards and leaflets: end corporate attempts to commercialize the genetic code; label GE-laced foods; ban corporate patents on life; restrain industrial agriculture; oppose biotech medical models that deny the majority of the world’s people access to affordable healthcare and basic medicines.
“People don’t seem convinced by the assertions of industry that GMOs equal progress,” warns author and Genetic Engineering Action Network activist Luke Anderson. “If the biotech industry is allowed to continue with this global experiment, we could witness the commercialization of genetically engineered trees, fish, livestock, grains, fruits and vegetables.... In the next two decades, we could start seeing genetically engineered humans.”
Inside the Conference
Beneath corporate banners as tall as IMAX screens, I meet biotech researchers, executives, investors, lawyers, promoters, and development bureaucrats from Maryland to Malaysia — all chasing the golden goose of biotech. The conferees have a different biotech narrative, one as full of boosterism, as the protestors’ story is full of doom. Biotech advocates are either nonplussed or annoyed by the demonstrators. Most delegates felt no need to listen. BIO 2004’s featured speakers generally hailed the industry for developing potential cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and obesity. No biotech critics were included on the speakers’ list.
In the exhibition area, the San Francisco-based Institute for One World Health boasts that it is testing a spleen-disease drug in India and hopes to develop others with funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr Arthur Strosberg, the institute’s senior program officer, quit his job with a commercial pharmaceutical company to set up One World Health to make medicines “at a cost the population can afford. We wanted to do something about the inequity between the developed and the developing world,” he said. “This is a unique organization. I wish there were more of us.”
In Moscone’s West Hall, I visit a session on “Biotech Public Perceptions, Politics and Policy” that stresses the need for greater communication between opposing camps. Yet there was no attempt to engage protestors in dialogue or address their concerns. Clearly, the impacts of biotechnology are too important to be left to scientists. With so much power and money at stake, such dialogue is in short supply. Scientists complain about activists polarizing the debate, but communities around the world continue to resist the biotech juggernaut.
Outside Moscone’s air-conditioned alternative universe, the anti-GMO movement spreads like pollen in a spring wind. Food sovereignty has become a watershed issue for the Golden State. The conflict involves more than a debate about gene transfer or risk assessment: it concerns who will control the food supply, who benefits and who bears the costs. “This is about food as a culture versus food as a commodity,” says Antonia Juhasz, of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), “We need to localize ecological agriculture rather than globalize it.”
In March, Mendocino County residents passed a law prohibiting the “propagation, cultivation, raising and growing of genetically modified organisms” — the nation’s first countywide ban on GE crops. CropLife America, a lobbying group representing Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow, pumped over $700,000 into the campaign and still lost. (CropLife VP Allan Noe subsequently told the San Francisco Chronicle of plans to stage an end-run around democracy by urging Sacramento “to pass state legislation to prevent counties passing such bans” and asking Washington to “halt local bans.”)
Meanwhile, Mendocino’s victory has prompted citizens in Marin, Humboldt, and Butte to place anti-GMO initiatives on their November ballots. Similar campaigns are underway in Sonoma, Alameda and a half-dozen other counties. With the annual July 16 Reggae on the River turned into a benefit for an anti-GMO initiative, you know this movement is rocking.
California: A GMO-free State?
The US is the world’s top biotech crop producer. Worldwide, more than 167 million acres grow biotech crops — chiefly corn, cotton, soybeans, and canola — engineered to produce their own insecticides or withstand dousing by herbicides. Surprisingly, California (birthplace of the biotech revolution) remains virtually GMO-free. The sole exception is cotton (one-third of the state’s cotton is biotech), but ten key state crops — lettuce, tomatoes, sugar beets, rice, alfalfa, broccoli, grapes, apples, strawberries, and walnuts — are targeted for biotech production within the next few years. GE agriculture has become a defining issue in the Central Valley. California produces 20% of all US rice on 500,000 irrigated acres. Last September, the EPA granted approval for Bayer’s Liberty Link™ rice, a GE variant engineered to tolerate glufosinate herbicide.
“This is a critical time in California for farmers and consumers to become educated on the issue and make wise decisions,” said Renata Brillinger, director of Californians for a GE-Free future, a coalition of farm, environmental, and consumer organizations working to promote local, sustainable and natural food systems.
Biotech’s Mixed Record
Genetic engineering and pharmaceutical corporations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in technologies that have proven increasingly unpopular and unsuccessful. To protect these investments, the Gene Giants spend enormous sums on advertising and have established multi-million-dollar institutes to lobby politicians and government officials to open foreign markets to GE foods. “We know that more than 7 million farmers in 18 countries have adopted this technology,” BIO spokeswoman Lisa Dry maintains. “The facts are: farmers want this.”
“All the promises have proven false,” counters Antonia Juhasz. “Its use has not increased yields; it has not decreased the use of agriculture chemicals; it has not fed the world.” Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety in Washington D.C , concurs. He says GE crops “have done nothing to solve world hunger but instead have resulted in increased chemical use, lower yields and the destruction of family farms.”
A 105-page joint-report by India’s Research Foundation on Science, Technology and Ecology, Tuscany’s Commission on Food and Agriculture and the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization claims that biotech has failed to lower pesticide use or raise farmers’ income. Instead, biotech companies may be contributing to global hunger by using patents to restrict traditional seed-saving. “This report details a sad and consistent history of corporate greed and scientific failure in agricultural biotechnology,” Kimbrell observed.
Over the past 30 years, the biotech industry has lost $57.7 billion. If it weren’t for the success of a few companies like Amgen and Genentech, the industry would be declared dead-in-the-water. Last year, America’s Franken-farm exports ran an estimated $300 million loss, further compounding the US farming crisis.
“Farmers in the US have lost billions because of contaminated food exports and an unwillingness of foreign buyers to purchase GE food,” says Center for Investigative Journalism reporter Mark Schapiro. And because those lost sales are covered by federal farm subsidies, Shapiro notes, “We taxpayers are in essence subsidizing the biotech industry.”
In February, lab tests commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists confirmed that over two-thirds of corn, soy, and canola samples contained DNA from GE crop varieties. UCS predicts that it soon may be impossible to guarantee that any part of the US food supply is GE-free — a situation that would seriously disrupt exports of foods, seeds, and oils.
“GE foods have a lack of perceived benefits,” says Sabine Louet, News Editor for Nature Biotechnology. “The industry must recognize that food safety, moral and ethical issues, and public trust are built on openness and transparency. Studies show that the public wants to know why GMO’s are needed, who will benefit from their use, and who will be accountable in the event of unforeseen harm. The protests out on the street today are proof that the debate has not progressed; that great suspicion remains on the part of the public.”
Dr. Vandana Shiva, Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology in India, left a final sobering observation for her colleagues in San Francisco. “The reason it is so important we offer you American activists solidarity from across the world,” she said is that “your country is eating more GMO’s than any other, and your nation is the one that knows least about them.”
David Kupfer is a Berkeley-based freelance journalist.
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