Modifying The Argument - Brief Article

The biotechnology debate is a lesson in the art of intellectual acrobatics. GM critics are being characterised as Goliath, while the little old industry is portraying itself as David. It is the industry, apparently, which stands on the fringe, attempting to improve the world against all odds. It is we who stand tall and strong on the inside, defending the status quo.

All this, of course, is little more than the latest dishonest industry strategy, no doubt designed by highly-paid PR consultants. Before we all extract tissues from our pockets and violins from our cupboards, we would do well to recall one or two recent trends.

A few months ago, it was announced that the major biotech corporations had agreed to pool their resources to persuade consumers in the US that biotechnology alone would save humanity from the four horsemen of the apocalypse. They have agreed to spend a cool $50 million every year for three to five years for this purpose.

In this context, a decentralised, pathetically-funded, and routinely-rubbished gaggle of environmentalist critics seems fairly inconsequential. And our successes so far have come not because the playing field is tilted in our favour, but because we have nothing to sell or hide, no history to rewrite, and no vested interests to defend. The biotech industry, however, exists to sell, at any cost, a technology from which it will harvest great profits, and with which it will wield great power. Their marketing reflects this.

In the beginning, the main argument used by the industry was environmental: GM will reduce the use of pesticides. Most of the field trials, however, as the public soon learnt, were of crops specifically designed to resist the spraying of pesticides manufactured by the same companies that owned the crop patents.

Foiled, they moved on to 'feeding the world'. This, too, has been rumbled, not least because Third World citizens whose images the companies used in their propaganda have soundly rejected such exploitation, but also because traditional agriculture is demonstrably more productive and better structured to feed local people than export-based monoculture -- the avenue for which biotech is tailored.

Next on the list of arguments came the 'it's nothing new' line, which is currently being touted around by scientists and corporate spokesmen. Breaking down, in less than a generation, biological barriers that have evolved over millions of years, is apparently now the same thing as traditional plant breeding, an ongoing, incremental process with a 10,000 year trial period, whose ultimate judge is nature herself. This is like comparing a pat on the back with the application of a sledgehammer to the head.

In fact, while industry attempts to discredit the arguments of its critics as 'emotional', not 'scientific'; as 'intuitive' not 'rational', it has selected as its main weapons arguments that could not be more emotive or unsubstantiated.

The GM fiasco reached new heights in recent weeks with the news that up to 30,000 acres of British farmland have been 'accidentally' contaminated by GM seeds. Let us assume firstly that the planting really was an accident -- despite the obvious advantages this has brought the industry ('...see, no one died!' etc). Let's ignore the fact that our government waited more than a month before announcing the mistake, and unlike some of our European neighbours, has done nothing to punish the company responsible, or to ensure that what happened doesn't happen again.

Even assuming all this, government reaction to the event speaks volumes about what we are faced with. Agriculture Minister Baroness Hayman managed the astonishing claim that 'this is not a safety issue'. Considering that the technology has neither been tried nor properly tested, and considering most independent scientists advocate extreme caution when dealing with products of such an unpredictable nature, she either has access to divine knowledge or she is dressing her questionable opinion as scientific fact, consequently putting us all at risk.

Generally when mistakes are made, apologies follow. Not this time. Instead Agriculture Secretary Nick Brown issued gushing praise for Advanta, the guilty company, for promising to cover, to some extent, the costs of their own mistake by compensating farmers. Then, finally, came a flicker of honesty in the form of Environment Minister Michael Meacher, who admitted that there is no way we can control pollen from GM plants.

And what are we to make of the regulators? Does it not seem odd that small farmers are being regulated into redundancy while literally mountains of untested, illegal GM seeds manage to cross our sturdy borders? No doubt Mr Ismail Sergageldin, Vice President of the World Bank, has the answer. 'Small farmers are,' he explained recently, 'uninteresting customers'.

On another note, what better 30th birthday present could the magazine wish for? Minutes before sending this issue to print, news reached us of the German government's decision to phase out the use of nuclear power over the next 30 years. This momentous step means that one of Europe's leading economies will be nuclear-free by the time The Ecologist's 60th birthday arrives.

This is the first time any leading economic power has announced its intention to end nuclear generation, and it sets a precedent which other industrial economies should now follow. The German Green Party should be congratulated on what is probably the Greens' major political achievement on the world stage so far.

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