Fences and Windows (11 page)

August 2000

“This rice could save a million kids a year.” That was the arresting headline on the cover of last week’s
Time
magazine. It referred to golden rice, a newly market-ready variety of genetically engineered grain that contains extra beta carotene, which helps the body produce vitamin A. All over Asia, millions of malnourished children suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to blindness and death.

To get their supposed miracle cure off the ground, AstraZeneca, the company that owns marketing rights for golden rice, has offered to donate the grains to poor farmers in countries such as India, where genetically engineered crops have so far met fierce resistance.

It’s possible that golden rice could improve the health of millions of children. The problem is that there is no way to separate that powerful emotional claim (and the limited science attached to it) from the overheated political context in which the promise is being made.

GE foods, originally greeted with rubber stamps from governments and indifference from the public, have rapidly become an international repository for anxiety about everything from food safety to corporate-financed science to privatized culture. Opponents argue that the current testing standards fail to take into account the complex web of
interrelations that exists among living things. Altered soybeans, for example, may appear safe in a controlled test environment, but how, once grown in nature, will they affect the weeds around them, the insects that feed on them and the crops that cross-pollinate with them?

What has blindsided the agribusiness companies is that the fight has been a battle of the brands as much as one of warring scientific studies. Early on, activists decided to aim their criticism not at agribusiness itself but at the brand-name supermarkets and packaged-food companies that sold products containing “Frankenfoods.”

Their brand images tarnished, British supermarkets began pulling products off their shelves, and companies such as Gerber and Frito-Lay went GE-free. In the United States and Canada, environmentalists have set their sights on Kellogg’s and Campbell’s Soup, parodying their carefully nurtured logos and costly ad campaigns.

At first, the agribusiness companies couldn’t figure out how to respond. Even if they could claim that their altered foods had no harmful effects, they couldn’t point to direct nutritional benefits either. So that raised the question, Why take a risk? Which is where golden rice comes in. AstraZeneca now has a benefit to point to—not to mention a powerful brand of its own to fight the brand wars with.

Golden rice has all the feel-good ingredients of a strong brand. First, it’s golden, as in golden retrievers and gold cards and golden sunsets. Second, unlike other genetically engineered foods, it isn’t spliced with ghastly fish genes but rather melded with sunny daffodils. But before we embrace
genetic engineering as the saviour of the world’s poor, it seems wise to sort out what problem is being solved here. Is it the crisis of malnutrition, or is it the crisis of credibility plaguing biotech?

The boring truth is that we already have the tools to save many more than a million kids a year—all without irrevocably changing the genetic makeup of food staples. What we lack is the political will to mobilize those resources. That was the clear message that emerged from the recent Group of Eight summit in Okinawa. One after another, the largest industrial nations shot down concrete proposals aimed at reducing poverty in the developing world. As
The Globe and Mail
reported, they nixed “a Canadian proposal to boost development aid by up to 10 percent, turned down Japan’s idea to set up a G8 fund to fight infectious diseases, and backed away from opening their markets to farm goods from developing countries within four years.” They also “said no to a new plan to accelerate US$100 billion in debt relief for the poorest countries.”
[Even more telling was the June 2002 summit of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. The ambitious goal of the gathering was to reduce the number of hungry people by half; from 800 million to 400 million by 2015. Yet of the 29 richest countries, only two sent their heads of state to Rome, and one of those was Italy, whose leader was already in town.]

There are also plenty of low-tech solutions to vitamin A deficiency that have been similarly passed over. Programs already exist to encourage the growth of diverse, vitamin-rich vegetables on small plots, yet the
irony of these programs (which receive little international support) is that their task is not to invent a sexy new sci-fi food source. It’s to undo some of the damage created the last time Western companies and governments sold an agricultural panacea to the developing world.

During the so-called Green Revolution, small-scale peasant farmers, growing a wide variety of crops to feed their families and local communities, were pushed to shift to industrial, export-oriented agriculture. That meant single, high-yield crops, produced on a large scale. Many peasants, now at the mercy of volatile commodity prices and deep in debt to the seed companies, lost their farms and headed for the cities. In the countryside, meanwhile, severe malnutrition exists alongside flourishing “cash crops” such as bananas, coffee and rice. Why? Because in children’s diets, as in the farm fields, diverse foods have been replaced with monotony. A bowl of white rice is lunch and dinner.

The solution being proposed by the agribusiness giants? Not to rethink mono-crop farming and fill that bowl with protein and vitamins. They want to wave another magic wand and paint the white bowl golden.

June 2001

In the aisles of the giant supermarket Loblaws, between bottles of President’s Choice Memories of Kobe sauce and Memories of Singapore noodles, there is a new in-store special: blacked-out labels on organic foods. These boxes used to say “Free of genetically modified organisms,” but then Canada’s largest grocery chain decreed that such labels were no longer permitted.

At first glance, its decision doesn’t seem to make market sense. When the first Frankenfood protests came to Europe, chains such as Tesco and Safeway scrambled to satisfy consumer demand by labelling their own lines GMO-free. And when Loblaws entered the health food market with its line of President’s Choice Organics, it seemed to be going the same route. In ads, the company proudly pointed out that certified organic products “must be free of genetically modified organisms.”

Then the about-face, made public last week: not only will Loblaws not make the GMO-free claim on its own packages, it won’t allow anyone else to make the claim. Company executives say there is just no way of knowing
what’s genuinely GMO-free—apparently it’s too confusing.

More than 90 percent of Canadians tell pollsters they want labels indicating if their food’s genetic makeup has been tampered with, but Galen Weston, chairman of Loblaw Companies, has publicly warned that “there will be a cost associated” with such an initiative. This, in part, explains the obliterating magic markers: if Loblaws carries organic products labelled GMO-free, it’s harder to explain why the firm isn’t informing consumers when food
does
contain genetically modified ingredients, as is the case for roughly 70 percent of Canadian foods. So the grocer has made a rather brutal choice: rather than give consumers some of the information they are demanding, it will provide none of it.

And this is only one salvo in a war being waged by the agribusiness industry on consumer choice in the genetic engineering debate—not just in Canada but potentially around the world. Faced with thirty-five countries that have developed, or are developing, mandatory GM labelling laws, the industry seems to be doing everything it can to make those European and Asian labels as obsolete as the ones that have been scratched out at Loblaws. How? By polluting faster than countries can legislate.

For example, one of the companies forced to remove its labels is Nature’s Path, an organic food firm based in Delta, British Columbia. Earlier this month, company president Arran Stephens told
The New York Times
that GM material is indeed finding its way into organic crops. “We have found traces in corn that has been grown organically for ten to fifteen years. There’s no wall high enough to keep that stuff contained.”

Some organic food companies are considering suing the biotech industry for contamination, but the law is going in the opposite direction. Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser was sued by Monsanto after its patented genetically altered canola seeds blew into the farmer’s field from passing trucks and neighbouring fields. Monsanto says that when the airborne seeds took root, Schmeiser was stealing its property. The court agreed and, two months ago, ordered the farmer to pay the company $20,000, plus legal costs.

The most well-known contamination case is StarLink corn. After the genetically altered crop (meant for animals and deemed unfit for humans) made its way into the food supply, Aventis, which owns the patent, proposed a solution: instead of recalling the corn, why not approve its consumption for humans? In other words, change the law to fit the contamination.

Around the world, consumers are exercising a renewed political power, demanding organic options at the supermarket and asking their governments for clear labelling of GM foods. Yet all the while, the agribusiness giants—backed by predatory intellectual property laws—are getting the global food supply so hopelessly cross-pollinated, contaminated, polluted and mixed up that legislators may well be forced to throw up their hands. As biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin says, “They’re hoping there’s enough contamination so that it’s a
fait accompli.”

When we look back on this moment, munching our genetically modified Natural Values™ health-style food, our human-approved StarLink tacos and our mutated, farmed
Atlantic salmon, we may well remember it as the precise point when we lost our real food options. Perhaps Loblaws will even launch a new product to bottle that wistful feeling: Memories of Consumer Choice.

March 2001

The Taliban destroys two-thousand-year-old Buddha statues and we rightly shake our heads: how barbaric in these modern times to sacrifice graven images at the altar of religious purity. And yet, while Buddhas are bombed in Afghanistan, the European Union is engaged in its own quasi-biblical cleansing ritual: the fiery sacrifice of tens of thousands of animals to appease the hungry gods of free market economics. When I first heard the farm animals described as capital’s sacrificial lambs (it was German environmentalist Mathias Greffrath who said it to me), I thought it was hyperbole. Surely those hillsides were burning to protect public health, not the market value of meat or future access to foreign markets.

More than fifty thousand animals are being or have already been killed in Britain, with another ten thousand marked for death. In Germany, where I’ve been visiting this week, fifteen hundred sheep have been destroyed. There was no evidence of infection—simply a chance that the animals might have come in contact with foot-and-mouth disease.

Some of this, of course, has to do with health. But not all of it. Foot-and-mouth disease is of little health risk to
humans, and we can’t get it through food. The disease can be cured quickly in animals with proper medicines and quarantines, then prevented with vaccination. Where the virus takes its true toll is on the market. And the market demands grand gestures to restore faith in its systems.

And make no mistake: a system is on trial in Europe’s latest food scare. When a highly contagious virus such as foot-and-mouth enters the food chain, it forces consumers to think about how our food gets to the table. Polite phrases such as “integration,” “homogenization” and “high intensity farming” suddenly take on graphic meaning.

The process of assessing the safety of each bite rudely yanks back the curtain of packaging and exposes massive factory farms and abattoirs, huge warehouses, the mega-chain supermarkets and fast-food outlets and the long distances that animals and meat travel in crowded trucks and boats in between each of these links in the industrial farming chain.

It increasingly seems that what is on trial in Europe is the tyranny of “economies of scale” that governs every aspect of food production, distribution and consumption. In each of these areas, the players follow the familiar formula of lowering their costs by consolidating and expanding operations, then using their clout to press suppliers to meet their terms. Not only does this recipe hurt small farmers and cut down on the variety of foods available, it’s also a time bomb when it comes to disease. Concentration means viruses spread quickly through large numbers of animals, while globalization ensures they are carried far and wide.

Which is why Germany’s agricultural minister is talking about new subsidies to help 20 percent of the country’s farms become organic. And why British Prime Minister Tony Blair is making noises about loosening the grip of the big supermarket chains. It’s also why those hoping to barrel ahead with genetically modified foods are no doubt watching all this with dismay.

This latest food scare could well be the decisive opportunity that campaigners against genetic modification have been waiting for. After all, the most immediate danger posed by GM crops is the way that altered seeds are carried by the wind, mixing with unaltered ones. Yet it has been tough to get the public interested in this subtle and invisible threat to biodiversity. That’s why groups such as Greenpeace have tended to focus their campaigns more on potential dangers to public health, which, though more accessible, are less scientific.

But foot-and-mouth disease, which is spread through the air, now has much of Europe thinking about microbes and wind, about how interconnected the food supply is, how difficult it is to control any particle, no matter how small, once it has entered the system. “So be a vegetarian,” some are saying. “Go organic.”
The Financial Times
editors insist that “phasing out intensive agriculture is too glib an answer” and propose more “consumer choice.” Somehow I doubt that Europe’s food safety crisis will be solved this time with more organic niche marketing. After more than a decade of debates about mad cow disease, E.coli, GMOs and now foot-and-mouth, food safety is ceasing to be a health
issue, or a consumer issue, and becoming an economic issue, one questioning the most basic bigger-is-better assumptions of industrial agriculture.