Pharmaceutical companies hype themselves up as saviours of humankind – their
latest prescription is GM foods. Tony Wardle discovers that this new technology
is
What The Doctor Didn’t Order
You just knew it didn’t you? The committee charged with deciding whether genetically modified plants should be commercially grown in Britain has given the go ahead to GM maize. Monsanto’s placemen have delivered the goods!
Cheering the fact that two other crops were rejected is merely clutching at straws – the committee did what it intended to do and established a principle. The Government has speedily accepted the recommendation so all future debates on GM will exclude any moral dimension, forcing us to concentrate on technical arguments – how many lacewings can you stand on the head of a pin, type of thing.
Checking how far pollen travels or how many insects survive the short trial period is like checking the safety of arsenic by reading the bottle label for typographical errors. It is impossible to test any GM plant for the multitude of accidental happenings and the mixing of genes that can take place in the environment or the long-term effects they might have on human health.
The food allergies that afflict so many people are all confined to about ten foodstuffs – dairy, oranges, coffee, chocolate and so on. The reason, according to author Dr Neal Barnard, is that none of these foods formed part of our evolutionary diet in Africa. Tens of thousands of years and some of us still can’t cope with a bar of Chokkie Crisp! Imagine how we might react to genes or viruses – used as markers in the GM production process – that are entirely new to us.
But see, they’ve got me at it, trying to argue on issues I can’t prove. There are much more fundamental questions to be asked such as why are GM crops required in the first place and what is the track record of those who control them?
Pharmaceutical companies, the most powerful multinational corporations on Earth, are the pioneers of GM technology. Most are US based, with some in Western Europe and Japan. They have an unhealthy closeness to politicians and spawned the organs of world control, such as the World Trade Organisation, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which they manipulate like puppets. The 10 biggest pharmaceutical corporations turn over $380 billion dollars annually so we are talking mind-boggling power.
The image they promote is that of humankind’s saviours, developing new drugs and treatments to cure all known ills. In fact they cure almost nothing, merely alleviate the symptoms and frequently produce damaging side effects into the bargain. In fact, prescription drugs are now the fourth biggest cause of death in the US.
For non-lethal ailments such as indigestion, piles and headaches there is a bewildering choice of potions but one company’s products usually contain much the same active ingredients as another’s. Then there are the big killers – affluent, degenerative diseases such as heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and some cancers. This is where the big profits are made. The day a pharmaceutical company admits that these ailments are mostly a product of lifestyle and can only be prevented through environmental clean up and diet, is the day the world will end.
Witness the Bush regime’s recent pronouncement on obesity. It has challenged the World Health Organisation’s report which says the answer is to eat more fruit and vegetables and less animal fat and for all governments to promote healthy foods. This is faulty science, according to Bush, as he tries to protect food industry profits at the expense of our health.
It is all part of the greed which has driven health care in entirely the wrong direction. Only two per cent of health expenditure goes on prevention and the UK health service has been lumbered with a massive £8 billion tab of for pills and potions as a result. Every pharmaceutical company has teams of salespeople on the road and like double glazing sellers, they have one aim only – to increase sales figures irrespective of the actual human need.
So, their mission statement that they want to prevent human suffering is hogwash. They have a vested interest in maintaining high levels of disease and global inequality.
Medical intervention is most urgently needed in the developing world yet there is little or no research into treatments for these diseases of poverty because pharmaceutical companies know that those affected can’t afford to buy the drugs they develop. Even when treatments are available, as in the case of AIDS and HIV, the industry fights tooth and nail to keep the prices high and has no interest in helping those in greatest need.
Currently, 42 million people are infected with HIV – 100 million by the end of the decade and only five per cent are receiving treatment. It is the biggest health problem in the world and a moral outrage. South Africa has seen life expectancy slump from around 65 to 42 and doesn’t even know how to begin coping with the resulting millions of AIDS orphans.
The cost of HIV treatment in the West is about $10-15,000 per patient per year. Supplying generic drugs can reduce that cost to just $150, saving millions more from misery and dramatically reducing the number of infected babies (generic drugs contain the same active ingredients as the branded varieties). Despite a glaring human need, the pharmaceutical industry issued a law suit against the South African government to stop it buying generics but such was the world’s revulsion that it was forced to drop the case. The way was clear, it seemed, for affordable treatments at last. What a joke!
Enter President Bush again and his January 2003 State of the Union address. The US will provide $15 billion to fight AIDS and HIV, he said. Now, a year later, barely a single dollar has been provided and only $1 billion has been earmarked for the internationally-backed Global Aids Fund. This is the only money that can be used for buying the much-needed generic drugs. So what will happen to the rest?
A new drugs tsar is to be appointed from – you’ve guessed it, the pharmaceutical industry – who will ensure that most of the remaining $14 billion is used only to buy expensive, branded drugs from US companies, leaving millions of people without hope who could have been treated with generics.
Many impoverished countries were banking on manufacturing their own generic
drugs now that the 20-year patents on HIV treatments are beginning to expire.
This lifeline was also snatched away. As part of trade negotiations, new
barriers have been erected which effectively extend patents by a further
five years. It is tantamount to genocide but there is still more to this
shameful story.
High import tariffs discriminate against the poorest countries – the ones that big business tell us they care so much about – preventing them from developing their own industries and forcing them to remain as suppliers of incredibly cheap cash crops such as animal fodder. Thirty six of the poorest African countries – at the bottom of the economic heap with more than half the population living in absolute poverty – have been forced to privatise their state services, slash health and education spending and shift scarce resources into growing yet more cash crops. Even this doesn’t excuse Africa from its $15 billion annual foreign debt interest payments – a figure which dwarfs any supposedly benevolent gestures from Bush, Blair or their multinational backers.
Privatisation includes Western multinationals taking control of water provision and hiking up the price to a point where, in Mali for example, the cost can account for as much as 70 per cent of a farmer’s income. The result has been entirely predictable – once marginal but productive land turning to desert because no one can afford to irrigate it and the subsequent increase in poverty and desperation.
Pharmaceutical companies, of course, also provide drugs for farmed animals and the vast array of pesticides and fertilisers used for fodder crops and this accounts for perhaps 40 per cent of their turnover. And this is where GM comes in.
In all these ways, the big boys mould the world into a form which suits
their need for continued growth and profitability. And it is a rampant,
heartless, grasping, unconscionable
self- interest which is, quite literally, destroying the world,
its people, its animals and environment.
If a country tries to pass legislation to outlaw aspects of trade it believes are damaging, the WTO will intervene and instigate devastating trade sanctions against it. No trade can be banned because it is bad for animal welfare – moral concepts simply don’t exist in this brave new world. Every single environmental policy introduced by concerned governments has been rejected by the WTO if it in any way limits trade. It is a similar story of obstruction with health and food safety laws.
So, when the Monsanto’s of this world claim the right to introduce GM crops because it will enable them to feed the starving, it should produce utter derision.
Even when food shipments are supplied in response to famine, you can see a sub-agenda at work. Some African countries have rejected US shipments of GM crops but now, if they want to get even a smell of Bush’s $15 billion AIDS package, it seems they will have to agree to embrace GM foods. Why, you might ask, are the multinationals so determined to steamroller opposition to GM technology and why do they have such powerful backers? A clue to the answer lies in the January edition of Poultry World:
‘Some of the best minds in the business have been taken unawares,’ it
claims (they should read Viva!LIFE). ‘The cost of wheat
has effectively doubled and soya has rocketed by £40 a tonne. The
lack of EU wheat supplies is exacerbating an already tight world wheat
supply and the arrival of China as
a potential large buyer of grain has done the rest.’
What they are talking about is animal feed. The future profitability of the pharmaceutical corporations is dependent upon how far and how fast they can encourage the spread of factory farming across the globe. These stinking centres of animal abuse are fundamental to their future growth. The major hindrance to their plans is the lack of feed, its rocketing price and the uncertainty of water supplies. To consolidate their plans, the GM barons need to control all these elements.
Seeds from GM plants are largely sterile and ‘brown bagging’ – saving seeds from one year for the next – is therefore eliminated and arable farmers become utterly dependent once they fall for the promise of increased crop yields. They are also obliged to use the company’s pesticides. Factory farming is impossible without a battery of drugs and so livestock farmers also become dependent once they take the intensive route. And with livestock’s extraordinary consumption of water for drinking, processing and growing fodder, the control of water supplies is central to this plan.
What we are witnessing is the spread of global fascism but in a form that is entirely new. It has the support of national governments, who would sooner be a part of it than offer opposition and be crushed. As a consequence, it has rendered domestic politics almost entirely redundant and has homogenised political philosophy until there is only one version available – the one that is approved by the multinationals.
All the problems of greed, cruelty, environmental degradation and human suffering which presently beset us will get worse as the GM giants continue to plunder the globe. It might sound immodest, but Viva! is doing more than most governments to sound the alarm and our supporters are fighting back through their diet.
Interestingly, a group headed by a scientist and physician, Dr Matthias Rath (www4.dr-rathfoundation.org) has filed a lawsuit against Bush and Blair and the pharmaceutical industry at the International Criminal Court. I have never heard of them but they are alleging genocide by perpetuating ill health for profit and for launching wars which enable them to pass draconian legislation in order to control their own populations. Who am I to argue?