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The Biotech Industry
"The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded [with genetically engineered organisms] that there's nothing you can do about it, you just sort of surrender." Don Westfall, vice-president, Promar International, Washington-based food and biotech industry consultants.
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"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech foods,...Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring safety is the FDA's job." Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications.
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Monsanto has prosecuted over 475 farmers for saving RR seed for their own use and, apparently, some who adamantly claim not having done so.
Monsanto attorney, Roger Hughes, was quoted as saying, "Whether Mr. Schmeiser (Canadian farmer sued by Monsanto because his crops were contaminated with Monsanto's ge crop from an adjacent farmer) knew of the matter or not, matters not at all." In other words, it didn't matter if a farmer was aware of the contamination or not, they must pay!
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"There are 800 million hungry people in the world; 34,000 children starve to death every day. There are those who consider this a tragedy, and then there are the biotech companies and their countless PR firms, who seem to consider it a flawless hook for product branding. It is an insult of the highest and most grotesque order to turn those who live from day to day into the centerpiece of an elaborate lie [i.e. that biotech crops will feed the world]. The companies who make [GE foods], and the flacks who hawk their falsehoods, offer us a new definition of depravity, a new standard to plunge for in our race to care least, want more, and divest ourselves of all shame." Michael Manville, "Welcome to the Spin Machine"
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"The outlook [for the Genetically Engineered food industry] is less certain than it was three years ago. The euphoria has gone. Growth has fallen significantly. The industry has overstated the rate of progress and underestimated the resistance of consumers." Sergey Vasnetsov, a leading chemical industry analyst with Lehman Brothers, quoted in The Guardian (UK) 9/26/01
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Industry has been arguing vehemently for substantial equivalence, and "meanwhile, they're in the laboratory trying to make something substantially different, thereby avoiding labeling requirements. These new products (hepatitis lettuce, spermacide corn, etc.) will be substantially different. They will be treated in the marketplaec as a totally different paradigm."
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Executive Summary
This paper documents the early warning signs of health and environmental dangers of DDT, vinyl chloride, and leaded gasoline. In each of these cases industry scientists and/or public health officials warned of potential hazards but their advice was ignored at a great cost to human health and the environment. Now, genetically engineered (GE) foods have been introduced to our food supply and exhibit many of the same early warning signs.
Leaded gasoline was sold in the United States from 1923 through 1986. The gas additive was introduced without any safety testing even though it had been known for years that lead was a dangerous neurotoxin. Coordinated industry efforts, intensive lobbying, and campaign contributions kept the federal government from taking action to study or ban leaded gasoline for decades. We now know that leaded gasoline released millions of tons of lead into the air. Lead can cause brain damage and even death and is especially harmful to children. The impacts of leaded gasoline could have been avoided if independent safety studies had been conducted prior to marketing.
Vinyl chloride, used to make PVC plastic, has a similar history. When scientific studies confirmed that vinyl chloride was a dangerous carcinogen, the industry representatives signed a secrecy agreement to keep the information from becoming public. Meanwhile workers were getting sick and dying. We now know that breathing vinyl chloride at low levels over time can result in permanent liver damage, immune reactions, nerve damage, and liver cancer.
DDT was used all over the US on farmland, in households, and in residential neighborhoods to kill unwanted pests. Evidence of DDT's environmental and health impacts began to emerge in the 1950's. Then in 1962, Rachel Carson book, "Silent Spring" detailed the hazards of DDT to wildlife and human health. By the time DDT was banned ten years later, it had killed millions of birds and fish. DDT is now deemed a probable human carcinogen, suspected of causing liver damage, and blamed for triggering premature births.
Similar to these stories, GE foods have been introduced into our food supply with no required safety testing. Initial, independent studies indicate that GE foods can trigger unexpected or unknown allergic reactions, may damage our organs and immune system, can contaminate neighboring crops, and may cause ecological damage. Yet, industry studies about GE food products are considered propriety and are not available for peer review or public scrutiny. In reaction to the rejection of GE foods by many European countries and companies, the biotechnology industry is waging a massive propaganda effort in the US claiming that GE foods will revolutionize the way we live and solve some of society's biggest problems. When it comes it our food supply we should not take any health or safety risks.
In order to ensure that GE foods are truly safe, we make the following recommendations:
Hold biotechnology companies liable for any harm that comes from the use of GE foods. This will give them a financial incentive to ensure that GE foods are safe and provide compensation to any future victims.
Place a moratorium on GE foods until they are proven safe through independent, long-term testing for health and environmental impacts.
Require labeling of all GE foods that are proven safe to give consumers the right to know and choose. {http://www.foodlabeling.org/information/industry.asp}
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The Five Gene Giants are Becoming Four:
News Release:
Tuesday, April 9th, 2002
DuPont and Monsanto - "Living in Sinergy"?
Rather than enter into a marriage that even the U.S. Government would find unpalpable, the world's two most powerful Gene Giants have decided to live in sync by sharing their proprietary agricultural biotechnologies with one another. Unless the two titans are committing to long-term monogamy, such a tech-swap is the corporate equivalent of "unprotected sex". It seems the risks in this particular union will be offloaded on farmers with fewer choices and higher prices - the corporate notion of "Fee Love"?
Corporate Coupling: The low-key announcement by DuPont and Monsanto (85% owned by Pharmacia) April 2nd was presented as a "win" for farmers who, the companies' joint statement claimed, will have access to more technology choices. The companies are not proposing to merge. Instead the world's first and second largest seed enterprises are agreeing to swap their key patented technologies and to drop a bushel of outstanding patent lawsuits that have festered for years. The agreement creates the kind of non-merger monopoly that is overlooked by government regulators.
The DuPont - Monsanto alliance does not extend to the whole range of products and processes controlled by the two companies. Only agricultural biotechnology patents are involved but the companies' roles in crop chemicals as well as in seeds are implicated since the lion's share of their biotech activity relates to herbicide-tolerant and insect- resistant transgenes.
DuPont is the world's largest seed company with sales of more than $1.9 billion in 2000. Monsanto ranks a close second in the global seed trade with 2000 sales of $1.6 billion. Together they account for almost 15% of annual world commercial seed sales. In the lucrative U.S. seed corn market, the companies control 73% of sales.1 More to the point, the two Giants together command 41% of all significant agricultural biotechnology patents* and share about 93% of the GM seed market worldwide. In addition, Monsanto is number two in global sales of crop chemicals and DuPont is number five. In 2000, their combined sales amounted to .6 billion or 22% of global agrochemical sales. (For further details, please see ETC Communique, "Globalization Inc.", September-October, 2001, at www.etcgroup.org )
"Unprotected Sex"? The deal gives both titans cross-licenses to technologies for maize, canola (edible oilseed rape) and soybean crops. In their joint statement on the alliance, a DuPont VP said, "farmers can use the best of what both companies have to offer." Monsanto's spokesperson added, "This is a win for farmers". Among the particulars of the deal: DuPont wins a royalty-bearing license to Monsanto's latest Roundup Ready maize and soybean technologies, and DuPont's current license for Monsanto's corn borer technology will be opened up to allow DuPont greater geographic coverage and better terms. 2 In return, Monsanto wins "freedom to operate" access to DuPont's maize transformation technologies. Most significantly, the two giants have struck a deal on access to their proprietary germplasm for plant breeding. "Exactly why this should thrill farmers is not clear," Pat Mooney, Executive Director of the ETC group, says, "The agreement appears to encourage the two corporations to extend the use of existing technologies rather than to invent better ones and it cuts the number of major players down from five to four. This means less choice and less innovation for the same or higher prices." Mooney concludes. ETC group, and many scientists monitoring the world's rapid decline in crop genetic diversity, have argued that corporate concentration and technology monopolies destroy diversity. Commenting on the woes of maize genetic diversity late last week, Cornell's Dr. Jeffrey Bennetzen told The New York Times, "I personally do not believe that we can rely on the private sector to maintain genetic diversity. In fact, we can rely on them not to."3
Rites of Spring - Starlinked lovers: The DuPont - Monsanto alliance comes just as another biotech union is nearing consummation. This week, Bayer will seek European Union approval to acquire Aventis Crop Science. The merger was proposed last fall for .65 billion. Aventis is seeking a safe suitor following the famous "Taco Debacle" -- the escape of a restricted GM maize technology known as StarLink that somehow seeped into the human food chain in the USA and quickly spammed the Pacific Rim. The merger may only be blessed in Brussels and Washington if the new entity divests some of its agricultural products. On the eve of DuPont's purchase of Pioneer Hi-Bred (then the world's largest privately-held seed enterprise), Wall Street was actually expecting DuPont to make a bid for Monsanto. Once Pioneer was absorbed, however, there was no way that U.S. regulators were going to allow a DuPont - Monsanto merger.
DINCs (Double Income - No Controls): This is why some giants are favouring alliances over wedding bells. After more than a decade of frenzied merging, global corporations are discovering that marriages aren't all they're cracked-up to be. When titans mate, the commotion embarrasses even the most sanguine anti-combines regulators. Some multinationals have reached a size now where they must either not grow further or they have to enter into what polite society euphemistically terms "liaisons". "We used to talk about the worry-free 'DINKs'," Mooney explains, "Double Income - No Kids. For DuPont and Monsanto, this is 'Double Income - No Controls - 'DINCs'". According to The Economist, between 1996 and 1998, the world's biggest multinationals established over 20,000 such liaisons. The top 20 life industry companies more than doubled their number of liaisons with biotech enterprises in a single decade. More than one-fifth of multinational revenues are now drawn from these alliances - double their share from a decade ago.4 One of the major pressures to establish liaisons comes from the ambiguity and costs of patent litigation which has tied even the biggest companies up in knots for years at a time. Often it is cheaper and faster to establish an alliance than it is to continue courtroom battles. "The Gene Giants are being allowed to create global technology cartels that run below the radar screens of anti-trust regulators," Hope Shand, ETC group Research Director, concludes, "Patented technology monopolies need to be stopped at the international level."
UN Conventional Action: The ETC group is urging governments to monitor corporate technology transactions that could impact on the environment and on biodiversity through the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The CBD began three weeks of meetings in The Hague, Netherlands yesterday. In addition, ETC group is calling for an International Convention on the Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT). Agreement to negotiate ICENT should be reached at the "Rio+10" (World Summit on Sustainable Development) that will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa at the end of August. Finally, the group believes that the issue of proprietary biotech monopolies should be incorporated into the work underway at FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) to establish a Code of Conduct on Biotechnology. An intergovernmental meeting will discuss the Code in Rome in October. However, most civil society organizations including ETC group, agree that the code must not be voluntary.
[Reference: Colorado Genetic Engineering Action Network (COGEAN) Patrick West, Director - http://www.foodlabeling.org/gemedia/news/ge020409_dupontmonsanto.asp]
Tierra Azul Projects: www.tierraazul.20m.com
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