Jean-Pierre Berlan and Richard C Lewontin show how biotechnology companies are conducting an intensive propaganda war in support of their activities
Monday February 22, 1999
The Guardian
Life has two fundamental and paradoxical properties: the ability to reproduce and multiply, and the ability to adapt, change and evolve. The first has given us farming, the second selection.
Over millions of years this has led to an extraordinary genetic variability
both among and within species. In the course of their short
history humans have domesticated plants and animals, selecting them
and adapting them to their needs by exploiting and expanding
this natural variability. But towards the middle of the 19th century,
the motivation behind farming changed: instead of being driven by
a need to feed and clothe people, making money became the primary consideration.
Seed-producing 'investors' realised that their industry could not become
a source of profit if farmers continued to sow grain that they
had harvested themselves. By virtue of her prodigious capacity to reproduce,
nature became an obstacle to business, whose raison
d'etre - profit - is dependent on supply and demand. Because nature's
frustrating ability continually to reproduce could not at the time
be legally taken away by political means, the only way of achieving
the same result was to use biological methods. In time
agricultural genetics became devoted exclusively to this cause.
Success has been a while in coming, but last March the United States
Department of Agriculture and a private company, Delta and
Pine Land Co, patented the aptly-named 'Terminator' technique. This
consists of introducing a killer 'transgene' that prevents the
germ of the harvested grain from developing. The plant grows normally
and produces a harvest, but the grain is biologically sterile. In
May last year the multinational Monsanto bought Delta and Pine Land
Co and the Terminator patent - by now registered, or soon to
be, in 87 countries. Monsanto is currently negotiating exclusive rights
to it with the Department of Agriculture.
Also in May, the company tried to woo French public opinion with an
expensive advertising campaign about the philanthropic
wonders of genetically modified organisms (GMO). Nobody bothered to
understand the issues at stake, let alone explain them to the
public. In France the media, the scientific community and the French
Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and
Technological Options did not think the subject worthy of public debate.
Terminator is the culmination of a long process of seizing control over
living things that began when biological heredity started to
become a commodity. In 1907 Hugo de Vries, the most influential biologist
of his day, and the man who 'rediscovered' Mendel's laws,
was the only person to realise that in an applied science like agricultural
genetics, economics took precedence over science. He
understood what Monsanto and its ally-competitors use as a guiding
principle today: what is profitable affects, or even determines,
what is 'scientifically true' .
At the end of the 1930s scientists triumphed with 'hybrid' maize, which
was extravagantly feted. The technique of hybridisation, which
has become the model for agronomic research all over the world, is
now used in around 20 food species. Poultry of every kind and a
large number of pigs are also 'hybrids'. Geneticists claim that having
different genes - 'hybridity' - is beneficial per se. In reality,
geneticists were actually using inbreeding to create sterility.
Until recently the investors could not reveal their true design - the
sterilisation of living things - without making it unachievable. The
peasantry was a powerful social group. Life was sacred. But peasants
are disappearing: they have become farmers, eagerly awaiting
the smallest sign of 'progress' capable of delaying their ultimate
demise. And life has been reduced to a source of profits in the banal
form of strands of DNA.
Numbed by 20 years of neo-liberal propaganda, people have been conditioned
to look to science and technology for the answers to
society's major political problems, while politicians are content to
'manage'. Small breeding firms have given way to a powerful
genetic-industrial complex with ramifications extending into the very
heart of research. Terminator shows how this complex now feels
so powerful that it no longer needs to hide its quest for control over
life itself.
For example, Monsanto, the firm that is most advanced in 'life science'
applications, has no compunction about publishing
threatening advertisements in American farming journals. Under a banner
headline pointing out the cost of planting pirated seed, it
reminds farmers who purchased Biotech seed - genetically modified and
including a gene for resistance to Roundup, its flagship
herbicide - that they are not entitled to keep any of the harvested
grain for use as seed the following year. This is 'contractual
sterility'.
But the farmer may have bought Roundup Ready grain without signing a
contract - from neighbours, for example. In that case the
company can prosecute him because the variety is patented. So now we
have 'legal sterility'.
Monsanto is using the old familiar response of hiring Pinkerton agency
detectives to track down farmers who 'pirate' its seed as well
as using more conventional informers: neighbours, crop-spraying companies
and seed merchants. To avoid a potentially ruinous
lawsuit, more than 100 farmers have been obliged to destroy their crops,
pay compensation and allow Monsanto agents to inspect
their accounts and their farms for years to come. It is perfectly legal
to keep harvested grain to sow the following year: the farmer's
only obligation is not to sell that grain to his neighbours. But according
to Monsanto, that right does not apply to genetically modified
seed that is covered by a patent .
As for the risks of 'biological pollution' and the consequences - quite
unknown - of genetically modified varieties for public health and
the environment, the genetic-industrial complex's philosophy was clearly
summed up by Monsanto's communications director Phil
Angell when he said with unusual frankness that his company had 'no
need to guarantee the safety of genetically modified food
products'; it was only interested in selling as many as possible, and
safety was a matter for the Food and Drug Administration. This
from the people who paint the benefits of genetic manipulation in such
glowing colours .
Monsanto and its ally-competitors,have specialised in the 'life sciences'.
These are strange life sciences that conspire against the
marvellous property of living things to reproduce themselves and multiply
in farmers' fields so that capital can reproduce and multiply
in investors' bank accounts. Will we soon be forced to brick up doors
and windows to protect candle makers from unfair competition
from the sun)? There is no shortage of arguments that the sun should
shine for everyone. Here are just four.
First, the wealth of variety was created by peasants all over the world,
the Third World in particular. The domestication and
selection/adaptation work done by peasants over thousands of years
has built up a biological heritage from which the industrialised
nations have greatly benefited - and which they have plundered and
partly destroyed. American agriculture was built from these
genetic resources freely imported from all over the world (the only
important species native to North America is the sunflower). If
justice still means anything, the US should repay their 'genetic debt'
to the world.
Second, we owe the unprecedented increase in yields in the industrial
countries, as well as the Third World, to the free movement of
knowledge and genetic resources and to public research. (Yields have
increased four or five fold in two generations, after taking 12 to
15 generations to double and being no doubt much unchanged for thousands
of years before that.) The contribution of private
research has been marginal, including in the US with its hybrid maize.
For example, in the course of the 1970s nearly all the hybrids in the
US corn belt were the result of crossing two public lines - from
the universities of Iowa and Missouri. It is public research, and public
research alone, that does all the basic work on improving the
populations of plants on which everything depends. Research work is
being hampered by the privatisation of knowledge, genetic
resources and the techniques for their use. Tired of paying royalties
on genetic resources that were snatched from them in the first
place, many countries in the southern hemisphere are now trying to
stop their circulation.
Third, experience shows that the price of privatised 'genetic progress'
is and will be exorbitant. For example, in 1986 a National
Agronomic Research Institute (INRA) researcher estimated the additional
cost of hybrid wheat seed at between 6 and 8 quintals per
hectare. Another researcher, in charge of the INRA hybrid wheat programme
recently came up with an even higher figure of 8 to 10
quintals per hectare sown. This means, at the very least, $500 million
a year, or the entire INRA budget, for a net gain of scarcely a
few quintals - a gain that can be more easily and quickly obtained
using lines or varieties produced by the farmer.
Fourth, giving up our rights in living things means giving the genetic-industrial
complex a free hand to guide technical progress along
those paths that will bring it the most profits rather than those that
will be most useful to society. Rambling on about progress in
general while ignoring how things are done in practice smacks of deception.
As does invoking some alleged 'social demand' in
justification of the scientific choices made by the authorities. Public
opinion is massively against GMO. There is no 'social demand'
for GMO; the term is simply being used as a smokescreen for the demands
of the genetic-industrial complex.
The myth of hybrids is easily exposed. On the one hand, farmers want
better quality varieties that are more productive per unit cost.
But they are unable to specify in what form. Unfortunately, they cannot
rely on scientists to tell them that there are a number of
routes to improvement and that the choice between a free variety and
a hybrid is a political, not a scientific one. Scientists are not
political animals, as we know.
On the other hand, investors, looking to maximise the return on their
investment, choose the most profitable varietal type: they take
the hybrid route of sterile varieties. Whether spontaneously or working
to order, researchers set to work, devoting their efforts
exclusively to the success of these hybrids. And, sooner or later,
the technique is made to work, proving the initial choice was
correct. The choice is like a self-fulfilling prophecy - the farmer's
demand for better varieties is transformed into a demand for hybrids.
In the fields of applied biology, health and medicine, we are trying
to get rid of the great scourges of cancer, obesity, alcoholism, etc.
But so far successful treatments for these diseases remain beyond our
grasp. The genetic-industrial complex - obsessed with profit -
puts itself forward as the solution. Confusing the agent with the cause,
it drums into us that these social ills are genetic and therefore
individual. The effect is to transform every healthy individual into
a potential patient, expanding the market to the limit - as it previously
did for seed with hybrids, and as it will do with Terminator.
By cutting themselves off from society in the name of objectivity and
technology, biologists are falling victim to their own narrow
concept of causality and their 'a-historicity' - easy prey for investors.
But the way for researchers to work for the better world that the
vast majority of us want is for them to open themselves up to the scrutiny
of their fellow citizens. That means scientific democracy.
The genetic-industrial complex is trying to transform political questions
into technical and scientific ones so that responsibility for
them can be shifted on to bodies it can control. Its experts, dressed
in the candid probity and the white coat of impartiality and
objectivity, use the camera to distract people's attention. Then they
put on their three-piece suits to negotiate behind the scenes the
patent they have just applied for, or sit on the committees that will
inform public opinion and regulate their own activities. It is a
serious thing when democracy no longer has any independent experts
and has to depend on the courage and honesty of a few
scientists and researchers, as it must, for example, in the nuclear
industry.
Such abuses are beginning to elicit a timid reaction. American biological
journals, for example, are asking their contributors to
declare their personal or family interests in biotechnology companies
and their sources of funding. This is the minimum level of
transparency that should be asked of any supposedly independent expert.
The legal system is also concerned, even if the politicians
are not. Last September France's highest court suspended the marketing
and cultivation of three varieties of transgenic maize
developed by Novartis, after the company had been authorised to proceed
by the ministry of agriculture. The court ruled that
implementation of of the ministerial decree should be postponed on
the grounds of caution.
Do we want to allow a few multinationals to take control of the biological
part of our humanity by granting them a right - legal,
biological or contractual - over life itself? Or do we want to preserve
our responsibility and our autonomy? Will farmers' organisations
continue to allow ruinous techniques to be imposed upon them, or will
they debate what should be in the farmers' and the public's
interest with renewed public research and a network of breeder-agronomists?
Finally, what are the intentions of 'public' agronomic
research - which for decades has been privatising the material of life
economically, and now biologically? There is another way. Turn
our backs on the present European policy of allowing life forms to
be patented, and declare living things 'the common property of
humanity'. And reorganise genuinely public research around this common
property in order to block the already well-advanced private
hold that is seeking to eliminate any scientific alternative that would
make ecologically responsible and sustainable agriculture
possible. Guarantee the free movement of knowledge and genetic resources
that have made the extraordinary advances of the past
60 years possible. Restore power over living things to the farmers,
that is to each one of us. Replace economic warfare and the
plundering of genetic resources with international co-operation and
peace.
• Jean-Pierre Berlan is Director of Research at the National Agronomic
Research Institute (INRA); and Richard C. Lewontin is holder
of the Alexander Agassiz chair in zoology and professor of population
genetics at Harvard.
• Copyright Le Monde diplomatique. This article comes from the January
edition of Le Monde diplomatique, now available in English
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© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
--
Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222