1.Apel's 'Money and Blood'
2.The Scotsman's idea of 'SCIENCE'
3.Today in AgBioView - Money and Blood!
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1.Apel's 'Money and Blood'
First of all an apology to subscribers and even an apology of sorts to New Scientist. Why? Well, that will become clearer in a minute but first a little detour via yesterday’s AgBioView bulletin. On the day of the UK's final farmscale trial results with headlines breaking like 'Transgenic crops take another knock' (Nature), 'GM Crops Harm Wildlife' (Press Association), AgBioView was silent on the day's big story, preferring to run the headline 'Andrew Apel is back!'
Who Apel? He's the editor of the biotech industry newsletter, 'AgBiotech Reporter'. He was also at one time a regular attack dog on C S Prakash's email list, using, for example, the Sept 11 attacks to put forward the view that scientific critics of GM like Dr Mae-Wan Ho and Dr Vandana Shiva had 'blood on their hands' as a result of the terrorist attacks.
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=12
On another memorable occasion Apel commented on police behaviour at the WTO meeting in Genoa, during which Berlusconi's police made a notorious night-time raid on the HQ of the Genoa Social Forum and the Independent Media Centre. The police suffered no injuries in the raid but over 61 of the occupants, many of whom were in their sleeping bags, were injured. But Apel told agBioView's subscribers, 'From everything I have seen, the police in Genoa never did anything other than defend themselves.. Police are dangerous people, that is why they are hired for the job they have. Only a fool goes against them, and in Genoa many fools have received their due.' More than a dozen of the 93 people arrested in the night-time raid were carried out on stretchers. Film footage showed walls awash with blood. 35 of the injured required hospital treatment with several requiring surgery. One of those whose arm was broken in the raid was a reporter.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,526484,00.html
Apel was also at the forefront of attempts by GM lobbyists to use the resistance of countries in southern Africa to accepting GM-contaminated food aid, as a way of attacking biotech industry critics. While even ardent pro-GMers like Prof Derek Burke have admitted the right of developing countries to determine their own biosafety policies on such issues and the need for their choices to be respected, Apel called on the U.S. to bomb Zambia with GM grain if it had the audacity to continue to reject it. On a discussion list Apel wrote of the crisis, 'I can almost picture the darkies laying down their lives for the vacuous ideals... their death throes, how picturesque, among the baobab trees and the lions!'
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=12
In Apel's latest offering, 'Money and blood' - the second item below - Apel talks about the 'infamous Oxfam' and the 'execrable Zambian Jesuits' who pretend, he says, to be the voice of the poor. Apel goes on, 'The Council On Racial Equality (CORE) has repeatedly pointed out the depravity of so casually counting the poor in developing countries as acceptable losses in the activist war against progress.' Actually it's not the 'Council On Racial Equality' but the 'Congress of Racial Equality', but what do such niceties matter - one set of 'darkies' is presumably as good as another when one's engaging in blackwashing and tokenism.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4987
According to Apel, activists opposing GM crops enjoy 'plush lifestyles' courtesy apparently of payments from 'Europe' and 'Britain'. Apel also seems to say the British government fixed the UK public debate on GM and the reporting of the farmscale trials in order to block GMOs. Clearly, Prime Minister Blair and his Science Minister Lord Sainsbury are playing a much deeper game than any of us ever realised. As Apel says, 'Such a vast chess game...'
The springboard for this drivel, topping a listserv that according to Prakash reaches literally thousands of scientists, journalists and bureaucrats, is, believe it or not, the New Scientist piece 'On the Uptake of Healthier GM Foods'. These healthier GM foods, says Apel, could become a success in Europe dealing 'a blow to credibility that activists can ill afford'.
Which brings us back to the apology. In a recent bulletin we asked, 'Is Monsanto's pulling a GM confidence trick with its supposedly healthier low linolenic acid soya beans? It certainly looks like it!' We went on to comment on two excerpts from the current edition of New Scientist which state that 'the first GM products claiming to have direct benefits for consumers have arrived'. We pointed out that this was misleading as the healthier trait in the plants had been created by non-GM means and Monsanto had deliberately turned it into a GM crop.
This is indeed the case. Monsanto has merely added a GM trait - Roundup Ready resistance - that has absolutely nothing to do with consumer benefits. But what we didn't say, because we weren't aware of it from the online versions of the articles available to non-subscribers, was that further on in the New Scientist pieces, it is made clear that non-GM breeding gave rise to the plant's supposedly healthier property. This we discovered when we got hold of the print edition of the magazine and got down to paragraph 6 of 'Will low-fat foods sway biotech sceptics?'
The content of para 6, of course hardly explains - indeed, it totally undermines - the industry hype that precedes it - 'Monsanto... says Vistive soya is leading a second generation of GM crops that benefit consumers not farmers,' etc. Monsanto could, after all, breed GM herbicide resistance into any food crop or herb that naturally had supposed health benefits and then say they were part of the new wave of healthy GM foods!
And it is not only people who fail to get as far as para 6 who are being misled. Both Apel's article and the Scotsman piece below make reference to 'healthier' plants courtesy of GM without any para 6 style clarification. Doubtless many more such pieces will follow even if AgBioView put Apel back on his chain.
Finally, we repeat our previous point aboutt Iowa State University conventionally breeding an even lower linolenic acid variety that would be better than the Monsanto one and which hasn't had any GM traits added to it
http://www.notrans.iastate.edu/
http://www.zfsinc.com/refining.asp
As it is better than the Monsanto product, it would be interesting to know what has happened to it and whether it is going to be made available (given that Monsanto like-minded corporations now own so many seed companies).
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2.SCIENCE
The Scotsman, 19 May 2005
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=296272005
GENETICALLY modified crops that have targeted benefits for consumers are to go on sale. The controversy in Europe over the first generation of these misnamed "Frankenstein" foods is likely to mean they will not be welcome. In the United States, however, they will sell well. Among the crops produced by Monsanto is a Vistive range of soybeans, which the company says will make processed foods healthier as oil from the beans doesn't turn into trans-fatty acids.
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3.Today in AgBioView on March 21, 2005 (http://www.agbioworld.org):
Money and Blood
- Andrew Apel, AgBioView, March 21, 2005 (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
From time to time, the news in one single edition of AgBioView happens to juxtapose nearly all the major current issues surrounding agricultural biotechnology in a way that brings them sharply into focus. That is the case with the March 19, 2005 edition.
In "On the Uptake of Healthier GM Foods" from New Scientist, we are told that "[o]ne of the biggest hurdles in selling genetically modified crops to sceptical consumers, especially in Europe, has been that there was nothing in it for them. All the traits commercialised so far, such as herbicide resistance, benefit farmers. So it is a major - and pleasant - surprise to find that the agribiotech company Monsanto has created a crop specifically to appeal to health-conscious westerners."
That claim, while true, conceals as much as it reveals. It is well-known that the currently available ag biotech products are those developed with the farmer in mind-as farmers around the globe have enthusiastically demonstrated, even to the point of risking crop destruction, fines and imprisonment. It is less obvious that Western consumers, much less those in Europe, will embrace agricultural biotechnology developed with specific health benefits in mind.
Such products have been in the production pipeline for years. The most obvious of these is Golden Rice, a favorite whipping-boy of Greenpeace. (See "Greenpeace Says that Golden Rice is a Technical Failure!") The Amsterdam-based multinational organization can easily oppose Golden Rice, because those who would most benefit from it are voiceless people of color whose political power is nil. Voiceless and powerless in actual fact, though Greenpeace allies such as the infamous Oxfam and the execrable Zambian Jesuits pretend to be their voice and to act on their behalf. The Council On Racial Equality (CORE) has repeatedly pointed out the depravity of so casually counting the poor in developing countries as acceptable losses in the activist war against progress.
Consumer-oriented products other than Golden Rice have been in the production pipeline far longer, and there is reason to believe that these will be treated far differently. The hungry cannot afford, literally, to worry about trans fats or linolenic acid in their diets. The wealthy can-and they are neither voiceless nor powerless. What is more, they can vote with their pocketbooks.
Now biotechnology is currently under fire from activists who claim that biotechnology is not living up to its promises to deliver products with human health benefits for the wealthy, in the same manner as they are criticizing Golden Rice. The trouble is, the casualties in this "theater" in the war on progress will not be the people Oxfam and the Jesuits claim to speak for. They will be wealthy people with money and political power. And there is the rub.
Europe has been quite successful in protecting its farmers from competing products by using activist groups to press its agenda. This is obvious from the funds the Netherlands diverts to Greenpeace and other groups, the Euros that the European Union bestows openly on the BEUC, and Britain's brazen manipulation of the statistics generated ("How to Make A Minority Look Like A Majority," Australian Science) by the farm-scale field trials and the 'GM Nation' public debate (which was no more "public" than it was a "debate.")
The question is whether Britain and Europe will be able successfully to use their paid-for activists to block products that wealthy consumer may well want to pay for. Activists are unruly servants, and their plush lifestyles are contingent on the dubious credibility they enjoy with taxpayers and the politicians who for now so gleefully abet them (See, e.g., "Genetically Modified Crops: Safety Research Falls Foul of German Politics," Science). The success of GM consumer products in Europe would be a blow to credibility that activists can ill afford.
In Europe, the activists have a distinct advantage they do not enjoy in the United States. In addition to European funding, activists also have European culture on their side. It is inviting to consider the European Union to be a 'melting pot' somehow similar to the United States, in that the EU combines so many different countries within a single political body. That would be a mistake.
The individual states that make up the EU and, indeed, the regions within those individual states-each have their unique histories, which citizens remember and retell in painstaking detail across generations. These histories entail everything from wars to perceived injustices, and stamp each parochial culture with a privately-owned brand of xenophobia. Far from glossing over European xenophobias, the EU collectivizes them and vastly magnifies the political penchant and economic ability to keep "outsiders" at bay. The European tendency to politicize everything, along with a blatantly superstitious approach to food and health, may make it quite easy to block GM products with demonstrated health benefits. (Bear in mind that as much as Europeans profess to love the environment, they are willing to sacrifice the environmental benefits of modified crops to keep "the others" out. "Blut und Boden is still alive and well, it merely has a face-lift.)
Money is interwoven with political and cultural concerns to the point where it's nearly impossible to understand them separately. Nowhere is this more true than in patent policy and law (To Patent or Not to Patent?). India will have to wrestle with the issues of intellectual property and in the course of that its lawmakers, and indeed everyone, should envision the possibilities of a system which grants intellectual property rights to an invention (a) in perpetuity (b) without public disclosure.
Obviously, this would be the ultimate dream for an inventor; a monopoly both permanent and secret. On the other hand, it violates our expectation that patent monopolies have short lives and that the nature and scope of each be easily
discoverable.
However, the US has the "ultimate dream" patent system for agricultural products. How can this be? Well, don't go looking for such a patent at the Patent Office. Go, instead, to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. These "stealth patents" are made up of registration data -- the voluminous data generated by field trials of agricultural products, which the law demands for new products. The corporations, which must by necessity be huge in order to afford the cost of these field trials, make the resulting data secret as a matter of routine. Public officials protect these secrets, and corporations may license these secrets to other corporations wanting to make use of the same technology. The cost for licensing these secrets is, of course, quite high. There is no expiration date on these secrets. The irony is that the corporations who widely tout the value of conventional patents, the extensive testing of biotech products and the conclusive demonstrations of their safety will do nearly anything, including launching suits against government officials, to prevent public disclosure of the results of these tests.
It is of course in the best interests of India to have a strong conventional patent system. A far better question is whether a parallel "stealth patent" system does anyone any good. It may appease the xenophobia of the biotech corporations, but it is inherently destructive to the industry.
Such a vast chess game... But it is a game with real money, and real blood.