And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Activist Mailing List - http://get.to/activist GENETIC `LIFE CONTROL' MEANS SOMETHING DIES DOWN ON THE FARM July 5, 1999 The Ottawa Citizen A13 Brewster Kneen, the author of several books on the agricultural industry, including From Land to Mouth, The Rape of Canola, and Invisible Giant, writes in this essay excerpted from his latest book, Farmageddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology that the slogan, `Food--Health--Hope'' is the motto of the most aggressive genetic engineering company on earth, Monsanto. The slogan appears to offer salvation, well-being, perhaps eternal life. It promises, writes Kneen, the triumph of science over death. Kneen says that the major transnational corporations involved in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, seeds and agrotoxins, Novartis, Monsanto, Hoechst/AgrEvo, Zeneca, du Pont and Dow, are engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to convince us that we should pay them to design, patent and administer life. Kneen talks about his family farming background, and artifical insemination, stating that only recently has it occurred to him that the problem was farm consolidation--called ``rationalization'' at the time--and the consequent disappearance of small, diversified family farms. Artificial insemination became necessary for us, says Kneen, because there were no farming neighbours and no herd sires to which we could take our cow. It was more ``rational'' to reduce the bull to a ``straw'' of frozen semen stored in a flask of liquid nitrogen in the back of the artificial insemination technician's car than to load our cow on a truck and seek out a bull many miles away. It seems obvious to me now that this was the first step to reducing all of life to a matter of ``genetics,'' as if a cow, a bull, a dog--or you and me--are simply genetic composites, much like a robot fashioned out of little Lego pieces of various colours and sizes. Kneen says that the purveyors and spin doctors of biotechnology--many with white lab coats on over their corporate blue suits--are inordinately fond of saying that there is nothing new about biotechnology; farmers have, after all, been selecting and crossing plants and animals for millennia. He says that when he worked to ``improve'' permanent pastures through rotational grazing and livestock management, mixed cropping patterns, cultivating and careful timing of seeding, the plants and the soil organisms were certainly undergoing changes, but were doing so on their own terms, within their own limits. Under these conditions, ``weeds'' lose their power and in some cases even become companions, contributing to a healthy ecology. Kneen goes on to talk about canola, which was not a product of genetic engineering as the term is used now. What is now labelled canola is actually a rapeseed with certain, legally defined, oil and meal characteristics. It was achieved through traditional selective breeding, growing out generation after generation of crosses, analysing the properties and agronomic characteristics of each generation and adjusting the breeding program in the hopes of moving in a specific direction, toward particular desired traits and characteristics. Keith Downey, a research scientist known as the ``father'' of canola, was a key player in this transformation of rapeseed, and despite the description above, Kneen says he may actually have crossed the line into biotechnology when he used an eye surgeon's scalpel to slice a rape seed in half. With what surely seemed like a small step at the time, he discovered that each half of a single seed contained the complete genetic code of the whole seed. This meant that he could set one half aside, then analyse the oil and meal characteristics of other half. If it was moving in the direction of the characteristics he was after, he could then grow out the half he had set aside to produce parent stock for the next generation. This ability added a dimension of precision to the traditional plant breeding process, but it was not genetic engineering. Kneen says that looking back, he now thinks that the violent intervention of Keith Downey's scalpel--the ``technology'' he introduced--was, in fact, symbolically and practically the beginning of commercial genetic engineering; the deliberate reconstruction of living organisms to create novel life forms for purely human (and commercial) purposes. And again, I ask myself, what was the problem to which the new genetic ``technology'' is supposedly the answer? In retrospect, Kneen says that such approaches to industrial farming have become essential due to the widespread adoption of monoculture production. Large-scale mechanized production of ``agricultural commodities'' (i.e. food) requires uniformity and standardization of all the inputs, including the genetic uniformity of seeds to be planted on a massive scale. The genetic uniformity of the field can also be enhanced by agrotoxins that eliminate all life other than the cultivated plant. This is now being realized through the use of plant species that are genetically altered so that they are able to withstand lethal doses of particular herbicides aimed at anything else green that grows in their midst. So the life of the designated crop is ``protected'' while the ``crop protection agents'' do their killing job on everything else. Of course, writesKneen, this also means the elimination of biodiversity, not only in the crop, but perhaps even more importantly, in the soil in which it is grown. Animal selection, artificial insemination, plant breeding by any means, and all similar activities fall under the heading of ``life sciences'' as the term is now used by major transnational corporations that only a few years ago were chemical companies, drug companies and start-up biotech companies. But these activities, says Kneen, all have macabre undertones of death. The food, health and environmental care that they promise seem always to be at the price of death, or at least at the price of violent interventions into life organisms and processes, whether the simple eye surgeon's scalpel or the tank of nitrogen containing the frozen semen. Death is, of course, the ultimate control. Kneen concludes we should beware of those who promise life while administering death, whether by pesticides or genetic selection. Mark Ritchie, President Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 2105 First Ave. South Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404 USA 612-870-3400 (phone) 612-870-4846 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.iatp.org
