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Rising rhetoric on genetically modified crops
(Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2003 -- CropChoice news) -- Andy Rowell and Bob Burton, PR Watch: "Their level of desperation appears to be increasing," says Michael
Hansen, a scientist with Consumers Union in the US, who monitors the
activities of the biotech industry as it lobbies for acceptance of
genetically modified (GM) foods. Hansen has watched with increasing
alarm as the pro-GM lobby escalates its vitriolic attacks on critics.
Over the next few months we will witness the final end game by
biotech
proponents to gain acceptance for GM. The pro-biotech industry has
accused its critics of fundamentalism and of hijacking the GM debate
to further their own political and trade interests. In reality, the
pro-GM lobby is using these very tactics itself.
The biotech industry is relying heavily on third parties to push its
message, including US and British officials, corporate front groups,
a
carefully selected group of farmers from developing nations, and a
loose coalition that includes right-wing think tanks and even a few
ex-Marxists turned libertarians.
For a year, the pro-biotech Bush administration has been trying to
isolate Europe over its moratorium on GM foods. In August of last
year, it seized a golden opportunity to demonize GM-opponents during
the famine in Africa. The US refused to supply the World Food
Programme with GM-free maize, despite the presence of hundreds of
thousands of tons available in the US and elsewhere. However, the GM
maize encountered considerable African resistance, and Zambia refused
to accept it.
In an attack that now appears to be part of a well-planned strategy,
Andrew Natsios of the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) argued that environmental and consumer groups
were
"killing millions of poor people in southern Africa through their
ideological campaign." GM was peddled as a "life-saving technology."
In the United Kingdom, the organization Cropgen serves as a front
group for corporate biotech interests, often coordinating its
activities with EuropaBio, which plays a similar role on a Europe-
wide
basis. In January, EuropaBio brought ten "representatives" from
developing countries to deliver their favorable perspective on
biotech
to the EU. Three of the representatives traveled to London to give a
press conference for Cropgen on the "need for biotechnology for their
continent."
Last year Monsanto flew T. Buthelezi, a pro-biotech African farmer,
300 miles to meet US Trade Representative Robert Zoelleck in South
Africa. In the last two years, Zoelleck has met every African trade
Minister in a bid to gain acceptance for GM and isolate the EU. He
tells them not to listen to Western environmentalists, dismissing
them
as Luddites: "It's equivalent to that period when people were opposed
to machines."
Pro-GM forces also took advantage of the World Summit on Sustainable
Development that was held in Johannesburg, South Africa in August.
During the WSSD, black farmers (including the ubiquitous T.
Buthelezi)
marched to defend their "right" to grow GM crops. Val Giddings of the
Biotechnology Industry Association described their march as a
"turning
point" in the GM debate, as "for the first time, we saw significant
numbers of real, live, developing-world farmers who have grown crops
improved through biotechnology speaking for themselves."
In reality, many of the marchers were not even farmers, and the press
contact for the march was Kendra Okonski, an American who works as a
co-ordinator for the International Policy Network (IPN) and as a
spokesperson for the SustainableDevelopment Network (SDN) in London.
Strange Bedfellows
Despite their green-sounding names, the IPN and SDN are actually
coalitions of libertarian and right wing think tanks across the
globe,
such as the rabidly pro-biotech AgBioWorld Foundation, based in the
United States. The directors of the IPN are Roger Bate and Julian
Morris, who have a history of dismissing environmentalism, organic
agriculture and climate change. Bate and Morris work for the
Institute
of Economic Affairs (IEA), a right-wing think tank based in London.
Bate is also a fellow at the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI), a leading anti-environmental think tank, where
Kendra
Okonski also used to work.
During the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg,
Okonski wrote an article for the TechCentralStation web site, stating
that "Africans are sacrificed on the altar of trendy green
delusions."
TechCentralStation, whose funding comes from companies including
ExxonMobil, AT&T, Microsoft, and General Motors, calls itself a web
site "where free markets meet technology." Its European web site
lists
a dozen affiliated think tanks, including the IPN, the IEA, the
Scientific Alliance and the Institute of Ideas in the UK -- an odd
mixture of libertarian, ex-Marxist, pro-corporate and
anti-environmental think tanks.
The Scientific Alliance claims to be an independent, impartial voice
that wants to offer a rational, scientific approach to environmental
issues, but actually it is a corporate front group led by quarry
operator Robert Durward, the director of the British Aggregates
Association.
The Institute of Ideas (IoI) is run by Claire Fox, who previously
published Living Marxism magazine. Fox's thinking is in line with the
old-line Marxist school of thought that promotes technologies such as
nuclear power and GM. Living Marxism had a history of attacking the
environmental movement as "Luddites," and its associates were behind
a
TV series called "Against Nature" that ran on BBC's Channel 4 in the
late 1990s. The British Independent Television Commission later ruled
the program makers had "distorted" the views of interviewees and
"misled" participants over the "content and purpose of the programs
when they agreed to take part."
Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at Kent University and a
leading figure in the contemporary Marxist movement in the UK, has
also worked with the IoI and its sister publication, Spiked magazine,
which is run by Mick Hume and Helene Guldberg, both former editors at
Living Marxism.
Hungry for the Truth
Last December, with Zambia still refusing to accept GM food, the US
upped the stakes. Tony Hall, the US Ambassador to the United Nations,
claimed that "people that deny food to their people, that are in fact
starving people to death should be held responsible for the highest
crimes against humanity in the highest courts in the world." His
words, aimed at the Zambians, provoked a furious reaction from
organisations in over 30 countries, accusing him of promoting an
"abusive" US foreign policy.
In January 2003, US trade representative Robert Zoelleck claimed that
European Union governments had threatened to withdraw aid from poor
countries that accepted GM food products. Poul Nielson, the EU
Development Commissioner, retorted by offering a deal: "If the
Americans would stop lying about us, we would stop telling the truth
about them."
Meanwhile in the UK, as the government finalized the details of an
official "public debate" on GM foods, the pro-biotech lobby sprang
into action. First came a conference organized by the Scientific
Alliance called "Fields of the Future." GeneWatch UK was invited to
co-organize but refused, citing the Alliance's anti-green bias.
(GeneWatch later organized an alternative conference in co-operation
with the Guardian newspaper and other sponsors.)
The chair of the Scientific Alliance conference was Lord Taverne, who
chairs Sense about Science, an organization that works closely with
the British Royal Society on contentious issues such as scientific
"peer review." Sense about Science says its role is to "encourage a
rational, evidence-based approach to scientific and technological
developments." Funded by learned societies and companies such as
Halifax, Uniliver and GlaxoSmithKline, it has an executive committee
that includes a number of distinguished scientists.
The director of Sense about Science, however, is Tracey Brown, who
used to work for a crisis and risk management PR company called
Register Larkin. RL's client list includes pharmaceutical, oil and
biotech companies, including Aventis, Bayer, Lilly, Pfizer and the
Bio
Industry Association. Brown is also involved in the charity Global
Futures, whose contact number is the same as Sense About Science and
whose contact person is Ellen Raphael, a Register Larkin employee.
Through Global Futures, Brown is also connected to the ex-Marxist
clique at the Institute of Ideas. She is the co-author of a book
published by IoI, and the domain name for the web site of IoI's
Spiked magazine is registered to Global Futures trustee Phil Mullan. Also,
Frank Furedi is the author of the only publication on Global Futures'
own web site.
IoI, in association with Pfizer, is sponsoring a weekend-long "Genes
and Society Festival" in London in April that coincides with the 50th
anniversary of the discover of DNA. The festival is being organized
by
the IoI's Tony Gilland, who believes that the UK "farm-scale trials
are an unnecessary obstacle" to the introduction of "beneficial and
benign" GM technology.
Spiked is also running seminars on GM. The latest, titled "GM food:
should labelling be mandatory?" will be held in April at the London
headquarters of PR firm Hill & Knowlton, in association with the
International Policy Network. Consumer groups are boycotting it.
Biotech for the Birds
In addition to think tanks and seminars, the pro-biotech lobby has a
strong reservoir of support from within the scientific community,
thanks in part to the role that industry plays as a major source of
biotech research funding. The scientists who study biotech are
inclined to support its development for the same reason that workers
at a Lockheed Martin plant are likely to support military spending:
their jobs are on the line.
The British Royal Society (RS), England's leading scientific body,
ostensibly dedicates itself to upholding high standards for
scientific
research, but it has employed a disturbing double standard with
regard
to biotechnology. The RS issued an entire report damning alleged
insufficiencies in Arpad Pusztai's controversial research linking
genetically modified potatoes to adverse health effects in rats.
Prominent RS members, including then-president Sir Aaron Klug,
vigorously opposed the publication of Pusztai's research. Lord Robert
May, then the government's chief scientist who serves as the
society's
current president, called his work "garbage" and accused him of
"violating every canon of scientific rectitude."
In January, by contrast, the Royal Society rolled out the red carpet
to publicize resesarch that purported to finally show ecological
benefits of genetically modified crops. The research, funded in part
by Monsanto, was conducted at Broom Barn, a government-affiliated
research center with biotech commercial partners. The Royal Society
celebrated the research in a news release claiming that GM crops
"could bring back increasing numbers of endangered wildlife and birds
such as skylarks and finches."
In the UK, more than a million people contribute financially to bird
conservation. From a PR perspective, therefore, the bird angle "is a
nice one. That is what everybody wants to happen, isn't it?" says
Elaine Calvert, the freelance press officer who wrote the Royal
Society news release. The biotech industry has been looking for a
bird
angle since at least February 2002, when this emerged as one of the
key recommendations of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, a
lobby
group funded by Monsanto, Bayer CropScience, BASF, Dow Agrosciences,
Dupont and Syngenta, with support from the PR firms Weber Shandwick
and Lexington Communications.
Broom Barn and the Royal Society briefed science correspondents,
prompting a story in the Guardian headlined, "Scientists grow
'bird-friendly' GM sugar beet." A similar report in the Independent
stated, "Insects and farmland birds can flourish in GM fields that
under conventional farming would be wildlife deserts." Lord Taverne
gave a presentation on the bird-friendy news to the House of Lords
and
members of parliament.
Actually, the Broom Barn scientists had not even looked at birds.
"The
trial plots were not big enough to look at birds," concedes lead
scientist Alan Dewar. "The bird angle isn't conclusive."
"Considering the way in which the RS and scientific establishment
have
attacked the quality of the science that questions the safety of GM,
it is quite extraordinary that they should promote this piece of
science," says Dr Sue Mayer from GeneWatch UK. "The only conclusion I
can come to is that they have some other motivation and that they are
not evaluating science fairly."
© Center for Media & Democracy, 520 University Ave., Suite 310,
Madison, WI 53703; phone (608) 260-9713; email editor@prwatch.org
Source: PR WATCH, Volume 10,
No. 1, 1st Quarter 2003 http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2003Q1/gm.html | |
