Re: Critique of Current GM Technology

From: QueeneMUSE@aol.com
Date: Mon Aug 28 2000 - 09:01:34 MDT


In a message dated 8/28/2000 7:19:52 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
retroman@turbont.net writes:

> The real issue is that the wheat was designed to be safe to
> > butterflies, but turned out to be unsafe for them.

retromike wrote:
> Give
> a starving man bread with rat poison in it, he'll eat the bread...
>

Actually this metaphor is really GOOD for blind faith. While optimistic and
excited about genetic engineering for obvious reasons, I am amused at the
level of gung-honess displayed here about GM. A crappy corperation that can't
get cereal right, and this list defends them tooth and nail because JUST LIKE
starving men, we want this technology to keep us alive.
Got Milk?
******************

PS: There are many perspectives on this, and I read them all not just teh
ones I want to be true.

VANDANA SHIVA

      Recently, I was visiting Bhatinda in Punjab because of an epidemic of
      farmer suicides. Punjab used to be the most prosperous agricultural
      regionin India. Today every farmer is in debt and despair. Vast
      stretches of land have become water-logged desert. And as an old
      farmer pointed out, even the trees have stopped bearing fruit because
      heavy use of pesticides have killed the pollinators - the bees and
      butterflies.
      And Punjab is not alone in experiencing this ecological and social
      disaster. Last year I was in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh where farmers
      have also been committing suicide. Farmers who traditionally grew
      pulses and millets and paddy have been lured by seed companies to buy
      hybrid cotton seeds referred to by the seed merchants as "white
      gold", which were supposed to make them millionaires. Instead they
      became paupers.
      Their native seeds have been displaced with new hybrids which cannot
      be saved and need to be purchased every year at high cost. Hybrids
      are also very vulnerable to pest attacks. Spending on pesticides in
      Warangal has shot up 2000 per cent from $2.5 million in the 1980s to
      $50 million in 1997. Now farmers are consuming the same pesticides as
      a way of killing themselves so that they can escape permanently from
      unpayable debt.
      The corporations are now trying to introduce genetically engineered
      seed which will further increase costs and ecological risks. That is
      why farmers like Malla Reddy of the Andhra Pradesh Farmers' Union had
      uprooted Monsanto's genetically engineered Bollgard cotton in
      Warangal.
      On March 27th, 25 year old Betavati Ratan took his life because he
      could not pay pack debts for drilling a deep tube well on his two-
      acre farm. Thewells are now dry, as are the wells in Gujarat and
      Rajasthan where more than 50 million people face a water famine.
      The drought is not a "natural disaster". It is "man-made". It is the
      result of mining of scarce ground water in arid regions to grow
      thirsty cash crops for exports instead of water prudent food crops
      for local needs.
      It is experiences such as these which tell me that we are so wrong to
      be smug about the new global economy. I will argue in this lecture
      that it istime to stop and think about the impact of globalisation on
      the lives of ordinary people. This is vital to achieve sustainability.
      Seattle and the World Trade Organisation protests last year have
      forced everyone to think again. Throughout this lecture series people
      have referred to different aspects of sustainable development taking
      globalisation for granted. For me it is now time radically to re-
      evaluate what we are doing. For what we are doing in the name of
      globalisation to the poor is brutal and unforgivable. This is
      specially evident in India as we witness the unfolding disasters of
      globalisation, especially in food and agriculture.
      Who feeds the world? My answer is very different to that given by
      most people.
      It is women and small farmers working with biodiversity who are the
      primary food providers in the Third World, and contrary to the
      dominant assumption, their biodiversity based small farms are more
      productive than industrial monocultures.
      The rich diversity and sustainable systems of food production are
      being destroyed in the name of increasing food production. However,
      with the destruction of diversity, rich sources of nutrition
      disappear. When measured in terms of nutrition per acre, and from the
      perspective biodiversity, the so called "high yields" of industrial
      agriculture or industrial fisheries do not imply more production of
      food and nutrition.
      Yields usually refers to production per unit area of a single crop.
      Output refers to the total production of diverse crops and products.
      Planting only one crop in the entire field as a monoculture will of
      course increase its individual yield. Planting multiple crops in a
      mixture will have low yields of individual crops, but will have high
      total output of food. Yields have been defined in such a way as to
      make the food production on small farms by small farmers disappear.
      This hides the production by millions of women farmers in the Third
      World - farmers like those in my native Himalaya who fought against
      logging in the Chipko movement, who in their terraced fields even
      today grow Jhangora (barnyard millet), Marsha (Amaranth), Tur (Pigeon
      Pea), Urad (Black gram), Gahat (horse gram), Soya Bean (Glycine Max),
      Bhat (Glycine Soya) - endless diversity in their fields. From the
      biodiversity perspective, biodiversity based productivity is higher
      than monoculture productivity. I call this blindness to the high
      productivity of diversity a "Monoculture of the Mind", which creates
      monocultures in our fields and in our world.
      The Mayan peasants in the Chiapas are characterised as unproductive
      because they produce only 2 tons of corn per acre. However, the
      overall food output is 20 tons per acre when the diversity of their
      beans and squashes, their vegetables their fruit trees are taken into
      account.
      In Java, small farmers cultivate 607 species in their home gardens.
      In sub-Saharan Africa, women cultivate 120 different plants. A single
      home garden in Thailand has 230 species, and African home gardens
      have more than 60 species of trees.
      Rural families in the Congo eat leaves from more than 50 species of
      their farm trees.
      A study in eastern Nigeria found that home gardens occupying only 2
      per cent of a household's farmland accounted for half of the farm's
      total output. In Indonesia 20 per cent of household income and 40 per
      cent of domestic food supplies come from the home gardens managed by
      women.
      Research done by FAO has shown that small biodiverse farms can
      produce thousands of times more food than large, industrial
      monocultures.
      And diversity in addition to giving more food is the best strategy
      for preventing drought and desertification.
      What the world needs to feed a growing population sustainably is
      biodiversity intensification, not the chemical intensification or the
      intensification of genetic engineering. While women and small
      peasants feed the world through biodiversity we are repeatedly told
      that without genetic engineering and globalisation of agriculture the
      world will starve. In spite of all empirical evidence showing that
      genetic engineering does not produce more food and in fact often
      leads to a yield decline, it is constantly promoted as the only
      alternative available for feeding the hungry.
      That is why I ask, who feeds the world?
      This deliberate blindness to diversity, the blindness to nature's
      production, production by women, production by Third World farmers
      allows destruction and appropriation to be projected as creation.
      Take the case of the much flouted "golden rice" or genetically
      engineered Vitamin A rice as a cure for blindness. It is assumed that
      without genetic engineering we cannot remove Vitamin A deficiency.
      However, nature gives us abundant and diverse sources of vitamin A.
      If rice was not polished, rice itself would provide Vitamin A. If
      herbicides were not sprayed on our wheat fields, we would have
      bathua, amaranth, mustard leaves as delicious and nutritious greens
      that provide Vitamin A.
      Women in Bengal use more than 150 plants as greens - Hinche sak
      (Enhydra fluctuans), Palang sak (Spinacea oleracea), Tak palang
      (Rumex vesicarious), Lal Sak (Amaranthus gangeticus) - to name but a
      few.
      But the myth of creation presents biotechnologists as the creators of
      Vitamin A, negating nature's diverse gifts and women's knowledge of
      how to use this diversity to feed their children and families.
      The most efficient means of rendering the destruction of nature,
      local economies and small autonomous producers is by rendering their
      production invisible.
      Women who produce for their families and communities are treated as
      `non-productive' and `economically' inactive. The devaluation of
      women's work, and of work done in sustainable economies, is the
      natural outcome of a system constructed by capitalist patriarchy.
      This is how globalisation destroys local economies and destruction
      itself is counted as growth.
      <snip The globalisation of non-sustainable industrial agriculture is
      literally evaporating the incomes of Third World farmers through a
      combination of devaluation of currencies, increase in costs of
      production and a collapse in commodity prices.
      Farmers everywhere are being paid a fraction of what they received
      for the same commodity a decade ago. The Canadian National Farmers
      Union put it like this in a report to the senate this year:
      "While the farmers growing cereal grains - wheat, oats, corn - earn
      negative returns and are pushed close to bankruptcy, the companies
      that make breakfast cereals reap huge profits. In 1998, cereal
      companies Kellogg's, Quaker Oats, and General Mills enjoyed return on
      equity rates of 56%, 165% and 222% respectively. While a bushel of
      corn sold for less than $4, a bushel of corn flakes sold for $133 ...
      Maybe farmers are making too little because others are taking too
      much."
      And a World Bank report has admitted that "behind the polarisation of
      domestic consumer prices and world prices is the presence of large
      tradingcompanies in international commodity markets."
      While farmers earn less, consumers pay more. In India, food prices
      have doubled between 1999 and 2000. The consumption of food grains in
      rural areas has dropped by 12%. Increased economic growth through
      global commerce is based on pseudo surpluses. More food is being
      traded while thepoor are consuming less. When growth increases
      poverty, when real production becomes a negative economy, and
      speculators are defined as "wealth creators", something has gone
      wrong with the concepts and categories of wealth and wealth creation.
      Pushing the real production by nature and people into a negative
      economy implies that production of real goods and services is
      declining, creating deeper poverty for the millions who are not part
      of the dot.com route to instant wealth creation.
      Women - as I have said - are the primary food producers and food
      processors in the world. However, their work in production and
      processing is now becoming invisible.
      Recently, the McKinsey corporation said: "American food giants
      recognise that Indian agro-business has lots of room to grow,
      especially in food processing. India processes a minuscule 1 per cent
      of the food it grows compared with 70 per cent for the U.S...".
      It is not that we Indians eat our food raw. Global consultants fail
      to see the 99 per cent food processing done by women at household
      level, or by the small cottage industry because it is not controlled
      by global agribusiness. 99% of India's agroprocessing has been
      intentionally kept atthe small level. Now , under the pressure of
      globalisation, things are changing. Pseudo hygiene laws are being
      uses to shut down local economies and small scale processing.
      In August 1998, small scale local processing of edible oil was banned
      in India through a "packaging order" which made sale of open oil
      illegal and required all oil to be packaged in plastic or aluminium.
      This shut down tiny "ghanis" or cold pressed mills. It destroyed the
      market for our diverse oilseeds - mustard, linseed, sesame,
      groundnut, coconut.
      And the take-over of the edible oil industry has affected 10 million
      livelihoods. The take over of flour or "atta" by packaged branded
      flour will cost 100 million livelihoods. And these millions are being
      pushed into new poverty.
      The forced use of packaging will increase the environmental burden of
      millions of tonnes of waste.
      The globalisation of the food system is destroying the diversity of
      local food cultures and local food economies. A global monoculture is
      being forced on people by defining everything that is fresh, local
      and handmade as a health hazard. Human hands are being defined as the
      worst contaminants, and work for human hands is being outlawed, to be
      replaced by machines and chemicals bought from global corporations.
      These are not recipes for feeding the world, but stealing livelihoods
      from the poor to create markets for the powerful.
      People are being perceived as parasites, to be exterminated for
      the "health" of the global economy.
      In the process new health and ecological hazards are being forced on
      Third World people through dumping of genetically engineered foods
      and other hazardous products.
      Recently, because of a W.T.O. ruling, India has been forced to remove
      restrictions on all imports.
      ** Among the unrestricted imports are carcasses and animal waste
      parts that create a threat to our culture and introduce public health
      hazards such asthe Mad Cow Disease.**
      The US Centre for Disease Prevention in Atlanta has calculated that
      nearly81 million cases of food borne illnesses occur in the US every
      year. Deaths from food poisoning have gone up more up more than four
      times due to deregulation. Most of these infections are caused by
      factory farmed meat. The US slaughters 93 million pigs, thirty seven
      million cattle, two million calves, six million horses, goats and
      sheep and eight billion chickens and turkeys each year.
      Now the giant meat industry of US wants to dump contaminated meat
      producedthrough violent and cruel methods on Indian consumers.
      The waste of the rich is being dumped on the poor. The wealth of the
      poor is being violently appropriated through new and clever means
      like patents on biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.
      <snip As humans travel further down the road to non-sustainability,
      they become intolerant of other species and blind to their vital role
      in our survival.
      In 1992, when Indian farmers destroyed Cargill's seed plant in
      Bellary, Karnataka, to protest against seed failure, the Cargill
      Chief Executive stated, "We bring Indian farmers smart technologies
      which prevent bees from usurping the pollen". When I was
      participating in the United Nations Biosafety Negotiations, Monsanto
      circulated literature to defend its herbicide resistant Roundup ready
      crops on grounds that they prevent "weeds from stealing the
      sunshine". But what Monsanto calls weeds are the green fields that
      provide Vitamin A rice and prevent blindness in childrenand anaemia
      in women.
      A worldview that defines pollination as "theft by bees" and claims
      biodiversity "steals" sunshine is a worldview which itself aims at
      stealing nature's harvest by replacing open, pollinated varieties
      with hybrids and sterile seeds, and destroying biodiverse flora with
      herbicidessuch as Roundup. The threat posed to the Monarch butterfly
      by genetically engineered bt crops is just one example of the
      ecological poverty created by the new biotechnologies. As butterflies
      and bees disappear, production is undermined. As biodiversity
      disappears, with it go sources of nutrition and food.
      <snip The world can be fed only by feeding all beings that make the
      world.
      In giving food to other beings and species we maintain conditions for
      our own food security. In feeding earthworms we feed ourselves. In
      feeding cows, we feed the soil, and in providing food for the soil,
      we provide food for humans. This worldview of abundance is based on
      sharing and on a deep awareness of humans as members of the earth
      family. This awareness that in impoverishing other beings, we
      impoverish ourselves and in nourishing other beings, we nourish
      ourselves is the real basis of sustainability.
      The sustainability challenge for the new millennium is whether global
      economic man can move out of the worldview based on fear and
      scarcity, monocultures and monopolies, appropriation and
      dispossession and shift to a view based on abundance and sharing,
      diversity and decentralisation, andrespect and dignity for all beings.
      Sustainability demands that we move out of the economic trap that is
      leaving no space for other species and other people. Economic
      Globalisation has become a war against nature and the poor. But the
      rules of globalisation are not god - given. They can be changed. They
      must be changed. We must bring this war to an end.
      <snip As Gandhi had reminded us: "The earth has enough for everyone's
      needs, but not for some people's greed".
      QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
      **Sujata Gupta, the Tata Energy Research Institute: I'd like
      to hear your views on sustainable use of scarce inputs like water for
      agriculture. What I gathered from your lecture was total condemnation
      of the market system. Vandana Shiva: Let me first respond by
      saying - I love markets. I love my local market where local "subgees"
      are sold, and one can chat with the women. The tragedy really is that
      the market is being turned into the only organising principle for
      life, and Wall St is being turned into the only source of value, and
      it's the disappearance of other markets, other valuesthat I am
      condemning. In terms of water, the solution to water conservation and
      scarce water management is not putting it in the hands ofthose who
      can afford to buy the last drop, but to put it in the hands of the
      community, to use it sustainably within the limits of renewal. The
      water must be returned to the communities and managed as a commons -
      it has to be taken beyond the marketplace.
      **Professor Marva, University of Delhi: Can there be
      sustainable development without sustainable population? Vandana
      Shiva: I think non-sustainable population growth is a symptom
      and productof non-sustainable development. It's not that population
      grows by itself as a separate phenomena - you look at the data -
      Indian population had stability till 1800 - colonisation,
      dispossession of land started to make our population grow. Highest
      growth rates of population in England is after the enclosures of the
      commons. It's the loss of resources of the people that generate
      livelihood and the replacement of resources by labourto be sold on
      markets in an uncertain daily wage market that triggers population
      growth. Population growth is a result of non-sustainable development.
      <snip Gulgit Choudhury, Ram Organics: I have worked earlier
      with Monsanto. I have a simple question to ask you. Suppose you were
      given the opportunity to develop parameters of a social governance
      which ensures sustainability - what would you suggest for countries
      like India.? Vandana Shiva: We are in fact involved for the
      last few years - generating the kind of criteria through
      participatory democracy building - through ensuring that people at
      every level have the information, through ensuringthat communities
      are organised, to manage collectively the resources that can only be
      sustained collectively. If I have the money and power to drilla deep
      tube well I can make dry my neighbour's shallow well and she will
      usually be a very poor woman. And therefore the only way a village
      can conserve its ground water is to do what the "Paani Panchayath"
      did in Harash - ensure that water is used within limits. Systems of
      governance have to begin with where people feel the impact, and
      therefore we do require the rebuilding of decentralised direct
      democracy. I do not see growers as isolated individuals because the
      consequences of their action are felt by their neighbours. If I am
      growing b.t. corn on my field I killthe monarch butterfly of my
      neighbour's field. Communities, collectives are cohesiveness of
      societies are important to talk about not individual growers, and
      that is the bottom rung of decision making to which both which
      corporations as well as governments need to be accountable - that
      isthe experiment that started after Seattle and that experiment in
      accountable localisation to ensure that decisions are made at
      appropriate place and production is carried out at the appropriate
      level is really thenew enterprise of democracy that societies are
      involved in around the world, even while globalisation threatens our
      lives.
      <snip **Finally, we had this from last year's Reith lecturer Anthony
      Giddens - addressing you Vandana he says - "I congratulate
      you on your challenging presentation. I have to say though I don't
      agree with much of it. Isn't it a contradiction in terms to use the
      global media to put a case against globalisation?"
      Vandana Shiva: I don't think BBC is a product of the economic
      globalisation regime that the World Trade Organisation gave us or the
      new recent trade liberalisation has given us. I think it was created
      in l922 and international integration, international communication is
      not what economic globalisation is about. Corporate concentration,
      corporate control is what recent economic globalisation is about and
      in fact the BBCis a counter-example to that because the real example
      of globalised media and communication is Time Warner, now bought up
      by American on Line, Disney, and the News Corporation.
      **Prof. Vinod Chowdhury, reader in economics at St. Stephen's
      College: It strikes me as very extraordinary that Vandanaji
      should have such a one sided approach. And I'm saying that with due
      respect to the sheer vivacity of her presentation. Vandanaji seems to
      believe that there are two clearly antithetical paradigms. One is a
      paradigm that essentiallyis based on decentralisation,
      democratisation - all the good things in life - - women are cared
      for, poor people are cared for - this, that and the other. And other
      is terribly evil. Everything's wrong with it. Now surely life cannot
      be like that Vandanaji may I plead with you to please consider third
      paradigm, where we take bits and pieces from here and thereand get an
      eclectic, practical approach, and I support Boopinder Singh Hooda -
      the President of the Haryama Congress who asked you - and you didn't
      answer that - what is the alternative at a time when no country
      canopt out of the WTO - it's not a piece of paper madam - it is a
      commitment that countries have to make or they will be paraiah
      countries and we cannot afford to be a paraiah country - please
      react? Vandana Shiva: I did react to him. And I said
      rewriting those rules - rewriting those rules that are one sided. In
      fact it's the WTO rules that are totally one sided because they
      really only protect the interest of one sector of the global
      community which is the global corporations, not in the local
      industry, not even local retail business, not small farmers anywhere,
      not in the north and not in the south. And those rules can be
      rewritten. That is the point I'm trying to make. Do not treat WTO
      rules inthe Uruguay Round Treaty as the final word on how trade
      should be carried out. Those rules are being reviewed. What we have
      called for in Seattle isa more democratic input in what sustainable
      and just rules would look likefor agriculture on intellectual
      property rights, in the area of services, in the area of investments,
      the four new areas which were brought in. Before that - no-one had
      problems with the GATT. The old GATT was about real trade in real
      products beyond national boundaries. The new GATT with the Uruguay
      round - is about invading in every space of our everyday lives... and
      if you are a woman you do have a somewhat different point of view.
      That's why we talk of gender. If you are poor, you will have a
      different point of view from the rich. To have different points of
      view because of differences in location in society is not a problem.
      It is opportunistic though to take a little element of the
      perspective of the rich , a little element of the perspective of the
      poor and put it into a little jigsaw of opportunistic statements.
      Societies live by coherent principles, organisational systems, values
      and world views. And what we are calling for is to balance out that
      one sided idea that we live by commerce alone.
      **Rovinder Raki, student: You seem to eulogise the fairness
      and efficiency of traditional agricultures, societies and production
      patterns. But the reality is that the farmers were exploited in these
      societies by moneylenders and feudal lords. With the market reaching
      these societies that exploitative social system certainly declines.
      Now what I have to ask you is what restrains you from appreciating
      this sanitising effect of the market? Vandana Shiva: Well
      the sanitising affect of the market does end up treating people like
      germs. Wipe them out. And it is that view of dispensability, the
      disappearances of the small that I was trying to draw attention to in
      my lecture. There has always been exploitation, and I agree with Mr
      Hooda, but no exploitation before this period of current, economic
      globalisation, ever organised itself in ways that it could totally
      dispense with the exploited. Even the slave system needed the slave.
      Even the worst of British rule which created the Bengal famine, and
      led to the "Faybehaga" movement to rise against the exploitation, it
      needed to keep the peasants alive For the first time we have a system
      where no-one needs the peasants,unless we realise as societies we
      need them, that we've reached a period where people are actually
      talking in India, in other countries that you can get rid of small
      producers. It's assumed that everything, real growth,real prosperity
      is going to come out of cyber space, but as you can see, you can have
      the best of IT technologies floating above the carcasses of people
      dying in Rajisthan and Gujerat right now -- and it will not help them
      out. We have to pay attention to the ecological base of our survival
      and the needs of all. I personally am committed to feeling and
      believing that the smallest of species and the smallest of people
      have as much a right to live on this planet with dignity as the most
      powerful corporation and the most powerful individual.
      ======================



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