[CTRL] FW: A Square Peg into a Round Hole

[Shane A. Saylor, Eccentric Bard]

 -Caveat Lector-

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On
Behalf Of Robert Weissman
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 1999 7:36 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list CORP-FOCUS
Subject: A Square Peg into a Round Hole


Fearful of a public backlash that might drive the biotech industry into
oblivion, Monsanto is reaching out to its critics.

Last week, Jeremy Rifkin, the biotech critic, flew to Monsanto's world
headquarters in St. Louis to address something called the World Business
Council for Sustainable Development.

According to a report in the New York Times, the multinational giants
wanted Rifkin to help them "paint a portrait of the biotechnology
landscape of the year 2030 and how it evolved."

Also last week, Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation,
met with Monsanto's directors in Washington, D.C. to persuade them to drop
the terminator gene. It used to be that farmers would plant seed, the crop
would come up and be harvested, except for a handful of plants, which the
farmer would let go to seed, and save that seed for next year's planting.
With the terminator gene, the crop comes up, but there are no seeds. So
the farmer has to go to Monsanto to buy more seed.

Conway told Dow Jones Newswires he is worried that the backlash over the
terminator gene, which is years from reaching the commercial stage, is
damaging public support for crop biotechnology in general, which might
slow research that could benefit poor farmers overseas.  "We have a lot of
people to feed and biotechnology is one of the answers," said Conway.

Whatever you feel about citizens of conscience meeting with corporations
to seek to persuade them to do the right thing, (and we are not of one
mind on this), it is clear that the biotech industry is in a panic over
its beloved high-tech future.

The masses in Europe are in full revolt over the issue (with the Prince of
Wales leading the charge against the corporatist Labor Party in the UK).
And a lawsuit that the mainstream press has largely ignored -- a lawsuit
that threatens the well-being of Monsanto, Norvartis and other biotech
firms -- is making its way through the courts.

In May 1998, a number of public interest groups sued the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), alleging that the agency violated federal law by
allowing biotech foods onto the market without first adequately testing
the foods for safety and then without adequately labelling those foods so
that consumers know whether, for example, they are eating fish genes
spliced into their tomato sauce.

The federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act incorporates the precautionary
principle -- a new food additive is presumed unsafe until established safe
through standard scientific procedures. But the FDA ruled in 1992 that
genetically engineered foods are not new food additives.

In the FDA's critical 1992 statement of policy on biotech foods -- the
policy that opened the floodgates that allowed biotech foods to pour into
the marketplace -- the FDA claims that it was "not aware of any
information showing that foods derived by these new [biotech] methods
differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way."

In fact, internal reports and memos obtained during the course of
discovery for the lawsuit reveal the FDA's own scientists warned that
foods produced through recombinant DNA technology entail different risks
than do their conventionally produced counterparts.

But these scientists were consistently disregarded by the bureaucrats who
approved the agency's current policy of treating bioengineered foods the
same as natural foods that have been changed by conventional breeding
practices.

"There is a profound difference between the types of unexpected effects
from traditional breeding and genetic engineering which is just glanced
over in this document," warned Dr. Louis Priybl of the FDA's Microbiology
Group in criticizing a 1992 FDA draft policy paper on the issue.

Dr. Linda Kayl, an FDA compliance officer, complained that the FDA was
"trying to fit a square peg into a round hole" by concluding that "there
is no difference between foods modified by genetic engineering and foods
modified by traditional breeding practices."

"The processes of genetic engineering and traditional breeding are
different, and according to the technical experts in the agency, they lead
to different risks," Kayl said.

Kayl and other FDA scientists recommended that genetically engineered
foods undergo special testing. To no avail.

So, Americans are now eating genetically engineered foods. And for the
most part, they don't know it.

The main genetically engineered crops in the United States are soy, corn,
canola, cotton, potatoes, papayas, and raddichio.  (You might say -- hey,
I don't eat cotton. But cottonseed oil is in many vegetable oil blends,
which are in many processed foods.)

It has been estimated that corn and soy alone are in 70 to 80 percent of
U.S. processed foods. And since 40 percent of this season's soybean crop
and 30 percent of the corn crop have been genetically engineered, you are
probably eating genetically engineered foods, whether you like it, or know
it, or not.

Steven Druker, the executive director of the Iowa City-based Alliance for
Bio-Integrity, is the driving force behind the lawsuit against the FDA.

The lawsuit has received little media publicity since being filed last
year, but Druker predicts that when the American people learn the details
of the FDA's deception, we'll see an earthquake of public reaction against
biotech foods.

"The FDA has been intentionally unleashing a host of potentially harmful
foods onto American dinner tables in blatant violation of U.S. law,"
Druker told us. "And they have been covering up the fact that they have
been acting so wrongly. I don't like that. And most people who learn the
facts do not like it."

Bon appetit.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy, Common Courage Press,
1999, http://www.corporatepredators.org.

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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