Kowtowing to Monsanto still leaves a nasty aftertaste
Catherine Bennett
The Observer, 16 August 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/16/catherine-bennett-gm-food-environment

Eat GM: "Better than starving to death!" It is not the most persuasive slogan in the history of food advertising. Nor, with this as his pitch, is Hilary Benn, the environment minister, ever likely to compete, as a twinkly salesman of repulsive treats, with figures such as Cap'n Birds Eye or Tony the Tiger. But he has to find some reason why, after refusing them for years, the picky British must now learn to love GM.

"The truth," Benn actually said, when he added GM to his new range of national austerity measures, "is we will need to think about the way in which we produce our food, the way in which we use water and fertiliser. We will need science, we will need more people to come into farming because it has a bright future." Did he mean that the only modern, sustainable farming is GM farming? If this endorsement was a little half-hearted, compared with what Labour ministers have said in the past, you can see Benn's difficulty. He's terrified that if he is honest about the government's determination to grow commercial GM crops in this country, the public will ˆ to use the technical term ˆ go off on one.

At all costs, Benn must avoid a PR disaster like that of a decade ago when Monsanto, the multinational that owns 90% of GM traits (or properties), set about wooing a sceptical British public with a series of huge newspaper advertisements. The tone, funnily enough, was not that different from Benn's last week: modern yet soothing; idealistic yet reasonable. Insufferably patronising. It struck Monsanto, back then, as just the right tone to take with consumers who had recently learnt, following the outbreak of BSE, that their lives had been endangered by a farming industry that fed live cows with dead cows.

"Worrying about future generations won't feed them," ran the slogan above one celebrated Monsanto ad, in 1998. "Food biotechnology will." Wasn't GM a better prospect, continued the chemicals giant, than conventional farming, whereby, along with lavish use of fertilisers, herbicide and insecticide, "soil erosion and mineral depletion exhaust the land"? "While we'd never claim to have solved world hunger at a stroke," it conceded ˆ after all, you'd want a couple of days for that ˆ "biotechnology provides one means to feed the world effectively."

The company was foolish enough, however, to make several, more immediately disprovable claims in its advertisements, for which it was duly rebuked by Britain's Advertising Standards Authority . As well as exaggerating its years of safety testing, the ASA concluded, Monsanto had not made clear in its advertisements that academic opinion on GM technology was divided.

To be fair to Monsanto, its advertisements did contribute to a national panic about GM food that helped to divide opinion on GM into two entrenched extremes which continue to this day. Biotech multinationals still bleat about feeding the world when what they are actually doing is selling chemicals to put on their patented crops. Or, in some cases, producing nothing more obviously useful to long-term global well-being than GM flowers. A peculiarly pointless example, the Moonaqua carnation, genetically modified to be purple, was recently approved for import as a cut flower by the EU. "The colour of these flowers is absolutely novel for carnation," says its creator, Florigene, "and offers the floral industry new uses for carnation." For instance, the industry can now attempt to camouflage genuine purple carnations inside arrangements of blueberries, something never done before.

On the other side, anti-GM campaigners still stress, as they have done for years, a dismal lack of evidence for either the safety or sustainability of GM crops, unless you count sustainable profits or sustainable superweeds, of which there are plenty. Prince Charles still witters about stewardship while he trails carbon around the planet. And much of the British press continues to flag up its enlightened scepticism by inserting the word "Franken" before anything related to GM technology. Here, for instance, is the Daily Mirror's opening paragraph on the Hilary Benn story: "Farmers may soon be allowed to grow 'Frankenstein foods' under new controversial plans."

One or two things have, admittedly, moved on since newspapers adopted this trick. Peter Melchett, for instance, the slayer of GM crops, left Greenpeace and became FrankenPeter, a consultant for the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, whose clients had included his old adversary, Monsanto. Maybe the gap wasn't so unbridgeable after all? More important, as the Observer science correspondent has argued, population growth and climate change are lending a new urgency to the debate. Ten years ago, when food shortages could be attributed to inequitable distribution, war and waste, it was easy for campaigners to dismiss the environmental and health risks of GM as unjustifiable.

Now that climate change appears to pose a greater risk, in the shape of absolute food shortages, reflexive opposition to GM crops could start to look, as Hilary Benn is hinting, like attitudinising. Already, he reduces the debate to a matter of safety: sorted. "The government's job is to ask if it is safe to eat and there is no evidence that it isn't," he told the Today programme.

"There is no evidence that it isn't"? As spectacular over-simplifications go, this is up there with the media's time-honoured reduction of the GM critique to Frankenprefixes and is, unfortunately, perfectly designed to rebut it. By focusing, to the exclusion of so much else, on the question of safety, the media have made it too easy for Mr Benn. He discovers no evidence of harm. But where would any intelligent person expect to find it?

While the investigation of safety, like every other aspect of GM, from research to patents to the sale of seeds to hard-up peasant farmers, is controlled by biotech multinationals, there will never be any trustworthy evidence one way or the other. The corporations are there to sell the world chemicals and seeds, not to look after it. Thus, the government's job is not, at the moment, to reconsider the safety of GM food. That can come later. Right now, it should explain how, in choosing to bring GM to Britain, it justifies placing this part of our national food policy under the control of a few fantastically aggressive and wholly unaccountable multinationals. Not that they can't be philanthropic. Monsanto recently gave a scholarly institution, the British Biochemical Society, a generous grant for educational materials, such as school websites.

No doubt the scientists' Monsanto-funded lessons will explain why, over 10 years since Monsanto offered to end hunger and save the world with GM, neither it, nor anyone in the industry, can offer a single drought-resistant plant. The children will want to know why, on the contrary, the spread of GM has increased the use of pesticides, exacting a greater toll on limited resources. But the biggest question is for the government. Anyone can see why multinationals want control over our food production. But why on earth does Hilary Benn want to hand it over?