Nature's Bagmen
The great wonders and mysteries of life now have the same status as a new electronic mousetrap or a painless nasal hair remover By Tony Wardle
A couple of months ago, Mr Blair’s government changed its mind and decided to vote for the EU ‘directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions’. It was one of the most intellectually barren political decisions ever taken in this country. It ends any residual hopes that developing countries might ever take control of the most important aspects of their life – food supply, health, the well being of whole populations, animal welfare and vast swathes of the environment. These decisions are now largely in the hands of unaccountable transnational corporations who have been given the right to patent and profit from genes – animal, vegetable and human – as though they were just another commercial product.
Motivated by fear and greed, Western governments are increasingly fawning before these monolithic, faceless institutions. They are terrified they might miss out on some financial spin off or suffer some spiteful retribution if they don’t give support. They are afraid that the big biotech companies might take their new industrial developments elsewhere – but above all, they are afraid of the people who elected them. It is a fear so profound that they have allowed no public debate on gene patenting. Sure, we can have a referendum to see which one of a dozen tired and self-seeking faces will get our vote to rule London but don’t expect democracy to run to such things as a say in the creation of life.
Greed is the motivating force behind the corporations who have demanded this directive with the sole aim of providing ever greater profits for their shareholders. The combined assets of the top 50 corporations accounts for some 60 per cent of the world’s productive capital. They wield such extraordinary power that smaller governments look on with impotence – larger governments hope they can ride the tiger. They have become a political/industrial juggernaut rampaging across the globe sucking up anything which might give them a commercial advantage. It is power for power’s sake and perverts truth, distorts science and purposely obscures issues of great public importance – such as whether the new technologies have the potential for massive destruction.
It is no accident that those pushing forward the changes are pharmaceutical companies. Before providing them with even greater power I would have expected Europe’s legislators to have considered their past performance to see how well it shaped up. Essentially, they have turned health services into sickness services and pretend they can provide a cure – a profitable one – for every ailment.
In the US, more than $40 billion dollars annually is spent in direct medical costs on heart disease and billions more on the search for a ‘magic bullet’ cure for an epidemic which is almost entirely diet induced. Enormous savings of resources and lives could be made simply by giving honest health advice – but of course there are no profits in that. It’s much the same with cancer – $35 billion in direct medical costs. The fruitless search goes on for a ‘cure’ with stock exchanges rising and falling on the prospects. Diet could exert immediate influence, eventually saving as much as half the total health costs. But how much is spent on prevention? Less than two per cent of the entire health budget!
Just as people are increasingly dosed with chemicals so are animals. Farming is the second biggest consumer of chemicals and the modern livestock industry could not survive without the daily use of antibiotics and pesticides. The outcome is an abundance of cheap meat which, combined with fat and processing, is one of the major causes of disease. What a gloriously simple formula – gigantic profits from producing foods which make people ill and then even more profits from pretending to make them better.
This is the background to the granting of political and commercial rights to patent the world’s plant, animal and human DNA. And it, like so much in the past, has been won with cynical promises – to cure world hunger and hereditary diseases. More than 12 million children die from hunger related diseases every year – often for something as simple as a six pence saline/sugar solution. The breathtaking wealth of the multinationals has done nothing for them and neither will it.
By dispossessing the people they claim to care about in order to grow cash crops, multinationals are part of the problem not the cure. The cure does not lie in patenting genes but in care, concern and justice, granting people the right to control their own destinies. The new directive offers no hope for any of these aspirations. Even if cures are forthcoming for some genetic diseases they will be available only to those who can afford to pay. The first signs are there with a US company’s application to patent one of the bacteria that causes meningitis. If successful it could lead to a royalty being levied on every single treatment used to combat the disease. But this is only one of the purposes behind gene patenting.
The intention of the biotech companies is to bring under their control the remainder of world agriculture. One of the first crops to be genetically modified is soya. It is a wonder food with the proven ability to reduce breast and prostate cancer and heart disease and to feed 30 times as many people as can be fed on meat from a similar acreage. It is being genetically modified not to strengthen these traits but to make it more resistant to herbicides.
To remain competitive, farmers will be obliged to buy the high-yielding varieties from the pharmaceutical company and swamp them with the same company’s herbicide. Because the seed is modified to contain a ‘terminator’ gene, farmers will no longer be able to retain part of the seed crop for the following year – they will have to buy new seed. This will bankrupt many. Control over seed, fertiliser, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides will be exerted across the range of food and fodder plants and across the globe. There is no mystery about why the big boys are doing it:
“The need was there to come up with a system that allowed you to self-police your technology, other than trying to put on laws and legal barriers to farmers saving seed…”
And that’s the US government speaking!
We already have a pretty clear idea of what the outcome could be because even by using old technology we have some chilling lessons. A little over a year ago, a report from the UN and one from the World Watch Institute both told a similar story – a catastrophic decline in the fabric of the globe with deteriorating land, water and air and the associated huge social and economic problems. In Africa, a land area 12 times larger than Britain is moderately or severely eroded. Across the world, three billion people are short of water, three-quarters of the world’s species are in decline or are facing extinction and the lives of billions of people are in jeopardy.
A principal cause is unsustainable farming and fishing dedicated to producing animal protein and this appalling decline is being subsidised to the tune of $450 billion annually, much of it going straight into the pockets of the multinationals. Everything that is planned for the future will make the situation worse. They are stamping on the accelerator, not applying the brakes.
Sir Crispin Tickell, one of Mrs Thatcher’s favourite ambassadors, and co-author of one of the chapters in the World Watch report said: “Nothing less than a different philosophy in local and national government will be able to avoid crippling social and economic decline.”
The EU decision on gene patenting was not a move towards a different philosophy but a reaffirmation of the old one. It will continue to push agriculture and health provision in entirely the wrong direction; human health will continue to suffer and it sanctions the right to exploit the poor and dispossessed even more ruthlessly. It will also unleash a myriad of new creations, the effect of which we can only guess at.
Genetic modification might destroy health benefits of certain plants, those that are pesticide resistant might pass on that resistance to weeds, just as different bacteria have the ability to pass resistance one to another. It will increase the use of pesticides with a growing impact on the environment and even human fertility. There are already studies which show that beneficial predatory insects such as ladybirds and lacewings are being killed by GM ‘insect resistant’ plants. And all this just as public opinion is beginning to grasp the scale of the current failures.
There are many parallels with the colonists of past centuries. But they simply enslaved people and took their land. This new approval gives the right to the new, dark-suited colonists to take their very soul. The world’s biggest organisations have won the right to turn all life into profit and they are far too powerful to be challenged by any individual. Only national governments have the ability to take them on. One thing is certain, it will not be the British government.