Far Afield: Biotech Propaganda and the Truth

Nearly half of Britain now believes that genetically engineered, or transgenic, food is a more pressing safety concern than mad cow disease, according to a September 1999 poll. Protesters in Europe have ripped up plants in company test plots. The anti-biotech movement in Europe has prompted supermarkets and a number of food processors, including Cadbury, Unilever and Nestlé, to commit to non-transgenic ingredients in some countries. And now McDonald's is going transgenic-free in the U.K. These things won't happen here, according to the American media, government and the biotech industry itself. Why not? Because, they say, American consumers don't care.

"American consumers ... have so far greeted the hubbub roiling Europe with a big yawn," Wall Street Journal reporter Lucette Lagnado wrote in a July 30 article on how Greenpeace got Gerber to stop using genetically engineered ingredients in its U.S. baby foods. Meanwhile, U.S. media and government portray concerned Europeans as alarmist, anti-American fanatics. "Europe seems to be gripped right now by a kind of collective madness," Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) said in an August New York Times interview.

Many analyses, from those in The New York Times to journals like Science, blame the European rejection of genetically engineered foods on food scares, such as the outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain and dioxin contamination in Belgium. Some American pundits claim that European resistance to genetically engineered foods is based on distrust of their regulatory agencies. "In Europe in particular, the credibility of [regulatory authorities] is very low. In the U.K., the handling of mad cow disease destroyed the credibility of the Government, the scientists and, to some extent, even the news media," Ray Goldberg of the Harvard Business School told a New York Times reporter in June.

Some say Europe is being protectionist, citing European rejection of hormone-tainted beef from the U.S. (see "Sale Bouffe" in this issue). "Coming in the midst of such a catfight, the [transgenic food] ban looks like vengeance as much as prudence," wrote Time magazine reporter Jeffrey Kluger in September. Actually, reasons put forth by European officials, farmers and consumers go much deeper. "What we reject is the idea that ... multinationals like McDonald's or Monsanto come to impose the food we eat and the seeds we plant," said Patrice Vidieu, secretary-general of the Confederation paysanne, a growing French farmer movement, to The New York Times. Now, with the fall harvest underway, American exporters are finding markets for transgenic corn and soy shrinking. Labeling laws to require identification of crops have been enacted in Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia. U.S. pet food maker Iams, Mexican corn tortilla producer Grupo Maseca, and Canadian corn processor CASCO have rejected genetically engineered ingredients.

American Consumers: In the Dark

These actions contradict the notion that Americans are yawning at biotechnology. Take Gerber's removal of transgenic ingredients. "I have got to listen to my customers," Gerber president and CEO Al Piergallini told The Wall Street Journal. After all, a January poll conducted by Time magazine found that 81% of Americans surveyed want genetically engineered foods to be labeled.

Most consumers don't yet know what's in our food. A survey by the International Food Information Council in February found that only about one-third of Americans know that supermarkets carry genetically engineered foods. The biotech industry estimates that 60% of processed foods contains genetically engineered ingredients, and a September investigation by Consumer Reports found them in many common processed foods, from infant formula to McVeggie Burgers.

When Americans "do know, they often act," Marion Burros noted in The New York Times on September 8, citing the ongoing consumer protest against rBGH, Monsanto's genetically engineered growth hormone given to dairy cows.

A growing list of environmental, agricultural and consumer organizations, including the 580,000-member Sierra Club, have joined the movement for labeling and stronger regulation of agricultural biotechnology in the U.S. As in Europe, activists assert the consumer right to free, informed choice in the marketplace, and farmers' rights to choose what they grow and to save their harvested seed for future crops. In addition to environmental, health and religious/moral concerns (see GG#60), this is a fight for the survival of non-transgenic, diverse crops and the world's small farmers -- the ultimate keys to food security, according to Peter Rosset, Ph.D., executive director of Food First/ Institute for Food & Development Policy.

Much like their French counterparts, participants at a September Farm Aid meeting on agricultural biotechnology called their free choice in agricultural decisions a "civil right" and an issue of "democracy." "Corporations want to dominate the regulatory process and agriculture in Europe and other parts of the world," says Dan McGuire, policy chair of the American Corn Growers Association, which represents 14,000 farmers.

How They Consolidate

Today, agricultural biotechnology is virtually controlled by five companies: Aventis, Monsanto, Novartis, DuPont, and AstraZeneca. Globally, these corporations control 60% of the pesticide market, about a quarter of the conventional seed market and almost the entire biotech seed market. DuPont gained full ownership of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, the world's largest seed company, in March 1999. Monsanto has spent more than $8 billion in acquiring seed companies, including Delta & Pine Land, DeKalb Genetics, and Cargill International Seed. Delta & Pine Land, with funding from the USDA, created the self-sterilizing "Terminator Technology" seeds. In May 1998, Monsanto and Cargill International jointly created Renessen, which will develop bioengineered grains for animal feeds.

The Foundation on Economic Trends and the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) are preparing an antitrust lawsuit against biotech seed and agribusiness companies, such as Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), to be filed in federal court by December 1. "Anti-trust litigation is only one piece. We also need short-term solutions for farmers -- access to non-transgenic seed, for example," says Kathy Ozer, director of NFFC.

Corporate Greed Won't Feed

The consolidation of seed and biotech companies and their seed patents hurts the local, small farmer (see GG#70). This makes a compelling argument against one of the industry's favorite self-justifications: that biotechnology will feed the world's ever-burgeoning population, now at 6 billion and projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The starving are featured in Monsanto ads and most press accounts on biotechnology, not to mention commentary by politicians. "The Europeans think they are protecting humanity, but we think they want to starve the rest of the world," said Senator Lugar in August.

Yet the record shows that current biotech crops are far from feeding the poor. In July, the USDA revealed that biotech crops had not, on average, improved yields or decreased pesticide costs for soybean and cotton growers. And a 1998 review of 8,200 soybean varietal trials by Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., found that Roundup Ready soybeans, bioengineered to resist Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, produce lower yields than comparable, non-engineered soy under most conditions.

Nor is world hunger likely to be assuaged by the type of crops designed and marketed by biotech companies. "The directions being taken are not intended to increase production. The purpose of Roundup Ready Soy is to help Roundup [the herbicide] get a larger market share," says Rosset. More than 90% of America's soy and 80% of its corn, whether transgenic or not, goes to livestock feed, not hungry humans. Neither soy nor corn -- or potatoes, papayas, squash, canola and cotton (cottonseed oil), the other transgenic crops -- are dietary staples of the poor in most developing countries.

Premiums on genetically engineered seeds make them too expensive for all but the largest Third World farmers. If Terminator seeds become commonplace, they will threaten the half of the world's farmers who rely on saved seed, writes Rosset in a September New York Times Op-Ed. "The media buys the basic corporate PR line that hunger is caused by scarcity, and therefore we need to produce more food at any cost -- even the health and environmental risks of transgenic crops. Food production is actually increasing faster than the population," says Rosset. But the poor lack access to this food.

Government & Industry Symbiosis

Since the Reagan Administration, the federal government has aided and abetted the agricultural biotechnology industry and its monopolization of agriculture. But government support is nonpartisan: President Clinton and Vice President Gore are strong proponents of biotech crops. In 1998, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsy sought French approval of Monsanto's Roundup Ready corn, a call from Vice President Gore cinched the deal. President Clinton sent Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman to France in June 1999 to negotiate for the sale of transgenic foods to the European Union, which had just banned approvals of any new biotech crops until 2002.

Sales Down, Labeling Likely?

Controversy over biotech has helped push the price of Monsanto's stocks down from $62 per share to $37 in the past year. Novartis sales for the first half of 1999 dropped by 10% to $3 billion, and the company announced it's cutting 1,000 agriculture jobs. Nevertheless, biotech supporters believe that the U.S. remains a strong market. Glickman, for one, "doesn't see Americans growing as fearful as Europeans, mainly because he thinks Americans have more faith in their legislators," according to Newsweek. But since July 1999, protesters have destroyed test plots of biotech crops in California, Minnesota, Maine and Vermont. A recent survey conducted by StrategyOne found that 40% of 1,000 respondents think the government should regulate agricultural biotechnology more closely, and 70% said the government should require companies to provide more extensive labeling. It seems that a biotech backlash has already taken root in the U.S.