Re: Off Topic: Basic Assumptions

[Margaret Tarbet <tarbet@swaa.com>]

More pathological greed.    

It's interesting that the right-wing, and rightest libertarians in
particular, go on about how hopeless government is...yet we can
easily see that government is very effective, when it's in the
interests of the wealthy that it should be. 


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.
Thepeasantry 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
multiplyin 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' [or perhaps even, in the case of most
animals, the property of themselves?  mmt].   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.