by Stefano Vaj
The explosive impact of all these prospectives is easily imaginable.
11 .GMOs and other monsters
While awaiting such revolutionary developments, it is perfectly true that we know very little about the unforeseen and undesirable effects of the genetic modifications already carried out by “standard” agricultural practices, especially with respect to food and its impact on consumer health.
The questions raised by GMOs (“Genetically Modified Organisms”) are in any case ill-conceived, starting with the controversy on the alleged risks of GMOs for consumers[315] that pits the United States (main producer of GMOs) and “developing” countries (main consumers, at least potentially, and sometimes producers themselves) against the European Union, even though the EU is also bound by the GATT treaties on the globalisation of trade.
Be that as it may, we know equally little about the long-term effects of the chemical substances used in agriculture or by the food industry.
In fact, it is only today that we begin to have a more precise idea about the nutritive and toxic contents of the very few “natural,” that is wild, vegetables used for food, and of those on the contrary deliberately hybridised and selected vegetables that have always been used in agriculture; still though, the number of compounds that these contain, as well as the effects in the mid- and long-term of their ingestion, remain uncertain and subject to debate, as do the differences to this effect in the different varieties available. One ought to remind the anti-GMO defenders of “traditional” agriculture that this traditional agriculture has in reality always been based on nothing more than empiricisms such as “whatever has not killed your neighbour is food.”[316]
Nor do we know the possible consequences of eating animals that have been raised on transgenic fodder, or even with much more traditional nutrients, such as the proteins extracted from ovine carcasses, not transgenic in the least, that allegedly caused Mad Cow disease.[317] And we know just as little about the results of the intake of drugs derived from transgenic organisms, spreading unimpededly also in Europe.
It is probable that we will continue to know less than would be possible, and desirable, as long as the biological revolution in question will be governed by the prospective short-term profits of the companies involved, or worse,[318] by how they fare on the stock market week by week; or until all research in this field is, as in Europe, discouraged or prohibited.
In reality, the majority of food crops are derived from thousands of “genetically” modified wild varieties, mostly created by the hybridisation of species that are not naturally inter-fecund, grafts, provoked mutations, goal-driven selections, cutlings, etc. In the United States, where not only the agro-industrial food lobby but also the biases against these practices is stronger,[319] the level of attention focused on the new technologies remains high, and in the end, as Bernard Schwetz remarks, “when you are dealing with biotech crops, you are changing just one or two genes of the plant’s structure. With hybridisation, there are more genes involved and more uncertainty.”[320]
The main differences of the “modern GMOs” are two, and none of these is in any way related to the health of the eater: the first is the fact that the modification of the gene line of the plant happens through the direct transplant of portions of DNA; the second, that today patents grant a twenty-year long (and above all international) monopoly to whoever obtains them. Hence Enzio Caprioli is absolutely right when he writes: “To adequately confront [GMOs] it is not enough to know everything about genetics; one needs instead to have a vision of the world that is able to confer to things their proper value and to value their proper recognition.”[321]
It remains however to understand which immediate, practical choices such values ought to dictate, and also what fate awaits those who do not have access to the relevant technologies – keeping in mind also that genetically modified crops can free genetic material into the biosphere, regardless national borders and local regulations. And here there effectively exists a political aspect in the most direct sense of the term.
The problem is in fact not the adoption per se of GMOs in agriculture, be they perilous or not like any other vegetable variety “naturally” edible or poisonous, but who today owns (or, more precisely, succeeds in gaining the legal ownership of) the relevant oligopolistic privileges, exclusivity rights and industrial secrets. In truth, in 2002 more than a fifth of the world’s area used to grow wheat, soy, cotton or cinnamon was already taken up by transgenic varieties, with an increase of 5 to 6 million cultivators, who in 16 nations planted these crops rather than those of the preceding year.
And, whatever a former Italian agriculture minister like Alemanno may think of it, the process is accelerating;[322] indeed he seems almost surprised that he is now able to hold a position that his own party might naively perceive as “nationalist” or “traditionalist” or “Europeist,” but whose final results appear deeply uncertain.
Rifkin remarks in this respect:
The top ten agrochemical companies control 81% of the $29 billion global agrochemical market. Ten life science companies control 37% of the $15 billion per year global seed market. The world’s ten major pharmaceutical companies control 37% of the $197 billion pharmaceutical market. Ten global firms now control 43% of the $15 billion veterinary pharmaceutical trade. Topping the life science list are ten transnational food and beverage companies whose combined sales exceeded $211 billion in 1995. […] Some of the largest life science companies are strategically positioned to control much of the global bioindustrial market in the coming century [which today has barely begun]. Novartis, a giant new global firm resulting from the $27 billion dollar merger of two Swiss companies, the pharmaceutical company Sandoz and the agrochemical company Ciba-Geigy, is typical of the trend toward corporate consolidation in the life industry in the new era of global commercial markets. Novartis is the world’s largest agrochemical company, the second largest seed company, the second largest pharmaceutical company, and the fourth largest veterinary medicine company. In 1995 Sandoz – now Novartis – purchased Genetic Therapy Inc. for $295 million. The Maryland-based firm held license on a broad patent covering the technique for removing cells from a patient, modifying their genetic makeup, and returning them to the patient’s body. […] The Monsanto Corporation acquired Holden’s Foundation Seeds in 1997 for $1.2 billion. More than 35% of the corn acreage planted in the United States is derived from germplasm developed by Holden. Monsanto also holds a 40% share in a second major company, DeKalb. Other recent purchases include Asgrow, a leading soybean company, and Agracetus and Calgene, two high-profile biotech firms. Dow Elanco has purchased a 65% share of Microgen, a biotech company that hold a number of potentially valuable patents in the agricultural field. DuPont, the world’s fifth largest agrochemical company, purchased a 20% in Pioneer Hi-Bred, the world’s largest seed company in 1997 for $1.7 billion. DuPont also acquired Protein Technologies International from Ralston Purina for $1.5 billion.
Of course conclusions are easily drawn from this, and since the time Rifkin covers things have gone just this way. And the fact that multinational conglomerates are not alone to take an interest in GMOs, but that anyone aware of the conflict of powers that is taking shape with respect to the ownership of these technologies does so too, is attested by China’s relative position at the forefront, not to mention Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which is investing much of its (scarce) resources in this field and has established a Centre of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana.[323]
From this perspective, it is of no importance for the discussion on GMOs, if and which of the current varieties will keep their promise, if this or that research is successful, if the GMOs are always and truly economically more advantageous than unmodified varieties, if this or that product will be rejected by the consumer etc. That which is impossible, or doesn’t work, or is economically inconvenient, or fails, or is organoleptically disagreeable will obviously not need to be prohibited[324]. What does create a potential probl
em is on the contrary just that which it is possible to make, that is destined to become a major success and manifest itself as drastically competitive from an economical (and biological!) point of view, conditioning agricultural independence and the very prospects of food self-sufficiency of the countries and areas implicated.[325]
The concern over genetic depletion created by the rush to monoculture spurred by the market (which has however been in place for centuries) is legitimate, as is the concern over the fact that the companies mentioned are releasing thousands of new, genetically altered, species into the biosphere, with unpredictable ecological consequences. But all that is already happening, and no introduction of some new kind of prohibitionism, even on a continental scale, will be enough to prevent it. Only major European investments, on the one hand in the conservation of the number of wild species that still exist and in its increase, and on the other hand in a research effort on the level of that in place in the United States, can limit such risks.
More directly involved still are changes in the balance of powers. While, as we have seen, there is no guarantee that there will effectively be no genetic exchange outside the areas where transgenic species are cultivated (including with allegedly natural or even “organic” cultures, as well as wild species), widespread, albeit reasonable, concerns about safety converge unfortunately… with the financial interests of the relevant companies to render sterile the marketed plant varieties, so as to give these multinational corporations an effective globalised monopoly, which tends to eternalise the economic dependence of single subjugated countries and continental areas upon the System.[326]
This links up with the issues pertaining to intellectual property on the yields of biotechnology.
Rifkin remarks:
The commercial enclosure of the world’s seeds – once the common inheritance of humankind – in little less than one century, while hardly giving more than a passing notice in the media, is nonetheless one of the more important developments of modern times. Just a century ago, hundreds of millions of farmers, scattered across the planet, controlled their own seed stocks, trading them freely among neighbours and friends. Today, much of the seed stock had been bought up, engineered and patented by global companies and kept in the form of intellectual property.[327]
In their turn, such seeds tend to be the only ones compatible with the products (herbicides, pesticides, fertilisers) manufactured by the same company, and with the modified ecological equilibriums that come from the use of such products, so that the area and the very possibility of traditional agriculture gets gradually restricted, even before finding itself altogether outside the market once exposed to the competition of the new integrated methods.
Now, the subject of intellectual property on findings in biotechnology can hardly be easily resolved, except in a context of radical solutions and drastic ruptures. If the recognition of a patent monopoly allows a handful of international corporations to increase their own power over resources vital to any hypothesis of political independence, the same patent monopoly is also what is necessary, at least for the private sector in a capitalist regime, to allow the local funding of the research required to oppose this power, in particular through the independent availability of the know-how and technologies implicated.
In other words, research of any kind can be privately funded only where the venture capital has the certainty that the exclusive benefit of its outcome will be enjoyed for a considerable period of time.
On this point the European Parliament’s fierce resistance to biotechnological patents[328] has played a deeply ambiguous role, because it has also limited the ability of European industry to finance (through the expectation of returns to be generated during the period of monopoly guaranteed by the patent) research programs able to compete with those of the large American conglomerates. This is all the more damaging when there is no protection whatsoever of the “raw materials” represented by the autochthonous genetic material (consisting in the local varieties, wild and domesticated, mostly plundered from developing countries, especially the equatorial ones, but obviously also present in Europe);[329] and in the framework of a worldwide integration into an “economic system of unconditional globalisation,” brought to further consequences by the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
Therefore, for anyone who sees in Europe his own community of reference, the problem is unlikely to be resolved merely by a few feeble attempts to delay (and besides only in the case of food products) the commercialisation in the European Union of by-products from organisms genetically modified elsewhere, or delaying the local production of these, but only by trying to reach an autonomous technological level in this sector that is equal or superior to the American one, something which is indispensable not only with respect to “competitiveness” in the setting of a globalised system (which one might aim to go beyond and bring down), but in terms of independence, sovereignty and even protection, inasmuch as it is possible, from the potentially catastrophic results of a purely mercantilist deployment of biotechnologies.[330]
Only in such a context, which at this stage should necessarily include incentivising and facilitating European research, the deliberate creation of public cartels or private cartels under strict public control, and agreements with the Third World for the joint and exclusive use of the genetic pool of their respective ecosphere, a semi-autarchic protectionism can meaningfully oppose, for example, the spreading of integrated agricultural methods that are beyond the political and economical control of the community of reference; or else it might make sense to adopt compulsory license policies for technologies now in foreign hands should their availability show itself necessary for the national/European economy.
The control of the relevant technologies appears crucial also irrespective of concerns over “commercial competition,” and in terms of protection of the territory and of one’s community of reference has a scope which exceeds by far the appropriate caution about genetically modified organisms, or the ability to “fight fire with fire” in the case of uncontrolled and destructive development of the latter.
As a matter of fact, genetic pollution has always been a risk, and one that Europe has had to reckon with for centuries, well before the moment when biotechnology appeared on the horizon. When the Europeans brought new species and textile fibres from the Far East, they also introduced a small packet of genes called Yersinia Pestis.
The Y. pestis in its turn moved to another packet of genes belonging to the family Siphanoptera commonly known as the flea. The flea then travelled around Italy with another packet of genes from various species of rats. This “genetic pollution,” well before Crick and Watson discovered DNA, lead to the explosion of what is known as the bubonic plague or “black death,” which in four years wiped out one third of the whole European population of the time.
Were we to ask American experts to name one notorious plant, animal and insect pest, chances are that near the top of each list would be kudzu, rats and Africanised or “killer” bees. None are native to North America.
Kudzu was brought to the United States in 1876 as a gift of the Japanese government. During the Great Depression the Soil Conservation Service promoted the plant for erosion control. Farmers were paid to plant fields of the vines. Now it covers seven million acres of the South and wipes out any plant that dares to grow in its path.
The rodent that plagues inner cities and farms, the “Norway rat,” probably originated in Central Asia. It is widely thought that the rats immigrated to the United States aboard the ships.
But the tale of the Africanised bee is the most interesting for our purposes because it shows the dangers of old-fashioned crossbreeding. Brazilian farmers sought to mate the hardiness of the African bee to the productivity of the European honeybee. Instead they obtained super-aggressive bees that consume honey as rapidly as they produce it, leaving nothing for beekeepers to collect. The insects then began a trek north that has resulted in dozens of dead
people each year and jeopardises the North American honey industry because it drives out the gentler local honey bees.
A federal study that looked at a selection of just seventy-nine harmful species and went back only a century found that these unwelcome migrants have cost the nation a cumulative total of nearly $96 billion. A 1998 article in Bioscience put the cost of bio-invader damage plus control at $136 billion a year.” Not a single penny of this has to do with transgenic species,[331] and this shows with even more clarity that the direct control of the biology of the territory is the only resource able to guarantee national security of any country.[332]
On the other hand, the delusion that one could simply keep “the biotechnological devil outside one’s door” is, even more so than in the case of nuclear proliferation, destined to be short-lived. Anyone who has not been convinced by the agricultural case already discussed need only think of the –always decisive – issue of military technology. Some applications, typically those that are made public, seem quite innocent.
For example, the US army is inserting into some microbes various artificial genes similar to those that in weaving spiders control the production of spider web; it so happens in fact that spider web is one of the most robust fibres there is on a by-weight comparison. Scientists hope to use the microbes to produce quantities matching specific variables, in order to be able to tailor it to different uses, from spatial engineering to the physical protection of soldier employed in combat[333], with obvious consequences as to their efficacy in “anti-terrorist” scenarios, or in occupation tasks, or in guerilla warfare.
Other research programmes appear even less innocuous. The same data banks and technologies developed by commercial genetic engineering in the domain of agriculture, livestock and medicine are easily convertible, and are probably already used, in order to develop a vast range of new pathogens that can attack plants, animals and humans. Biological warfare, as known, is that which implies the use of living organisms and organic compounds to military ends.