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The Politics of Food - by MARIA MARGARONIS
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The Nation, December 27, 1999
The Politics of Food
AS BIOTECH FRANKENFOODS' ARE STUFFED DOWN THEIR THROATS, CONSUMERS
REBEL.
by MARIA MARGARONIS
Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized
fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce.... "Jesus," Molly
said, her own plate empty, "gimme that. You know what this costs?" She
took his plate. "They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then
they kill it. This isn't vat stuff. --William Gibson, Neuromancer
London
A year ago, Monsanto chairman Robert Shapiro had the future in his
pocket. His vast "life sciences" corporation was at the cutting edge
of the new agricultural revolution, genetic modification; the spread
of GM seeds throughout the United States, he told his shareholders,
was the most "successful launch of any technology ever, including the
plow." The little matter of European distaste for the new crops would,
he felt sure, be resolved by the right kind of PR and some careful
scientific reassurance. As Ann Foster, the company's personable
British flack, patiently explained to anti-GM campaigners here,
"people will have Roundup Ready soya, whether they like it or not."
So far, things have not gone according to plan. The European Union has
a de facto moratorium on the commercial growing of GM crops, pending
further discussion (the only exception is the Swiss company Novartis's
Bt corn, currently being grown in Spain). Austria, Luxembourg, Italy
and Greece have total or partial bans on the technology. Even the
Blair government, in love with the sleek promises of high-tech
business and keen to keep Clinton sweet, has bowed to public pressure
and put off the commercial planting of GM seeds in Britain for at
least three years. (Environment Minister Michael Meacher, whose views
on the subject are carefully tracked by the CIA, has reportedly said
in private that GM crops will never be grown commercially here.)
Shoppers have rejected GM food in droves, prompting a breathless race
among the supermarket chains to go GM-free. As a report by the British
government's Science and Technology Committee put it, "At the current
rate at which food manufacturers are withdrawing GM ingredients...from
their products, there will be no market for GM food in this country."
US soy exports to Europe are down from $2.1 billion in 1996 to $1.1
billion in 1999, and anxiety about GM crops (or genetically engineered
crops, as they're generally known in the United States) is blowing
across the prairies. Last spring and summer a series of reports by the
influential Deutsche Bank urged investors to pull out of agricultural
biotechnology altogether: "The term GMO [genetically modified
organism] has become a liability. We predict that GMOs, once perceived
as the driver of the bull case for this sector, will now be perceived
as a pariah." In October a chastened Shapiro apologized to Greenpeace
for his "enthusiasm," which, he acknowledged, could be read as
"condescension or indeed arrogance." Monsanto's stock has gone
seriously pear-shaped, and the board has reportedly considered a
company breakup.
What happened? How did a loose assemblage of European environmental
activists, development charities, food retailers and supermarket
shoppers stop a huge multinational industry, temporarily at least, in
its tracks?
* * *
The first protests against genetic modification took place in America
in the late seventies, when activists from a group called Science for
the People destroyed frost-resistant strawberries and delayed the
construction of Princeton's molecular-biology building. Then they
fizzled out. Americans, by and large, trust the FDA to keep the levels
of toxicity in their daily bread down to a psychologically manageable
level and don't worry too much about the source of the goodies that
fill their horn of plenty. The great grain factories of the Midwest
work their magic far from the places most people visit to enjoy
nature. In much of Europe, though, nature and agriculture go hand in
glove, occupying the same physical and social space. Europe's layered
patchwork of farming and culinary landscapes has taken shape over
2,500 years, altered by small and large migrations, the conquest and
loss of colonies, wars and revolutions. Europeans feel strongly about
what they eat: Food is a matter of identity as well as economy,
culture as well as nurture.
The most dramatic changes in European farming in this century came
about partly as a result of the experience of famine during World War
II: The much-reviled Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European
Union has its origins in the determination that Europe should never
again see mass starvation. By protecting and supporting their farmers
against the vagaries of trade while simultaneously investing in
intensive agriculture (a contradiction in terms, you might say, since
roughly 80 percent of Europe's farm subsidies go to 20 percent of its
farmers), European governments hoped to insure long-term food security
for their people. But, as they usually do, the contradictions
eventually came home to roost.
"The fourth agricultural revolution," says Tim Lang, professor of food
policy at Thames Valley University and one of the new food movement's
intellectual lights, "is beginning just as the third one--
agrochemicals and intensive farming--is unraveling." The unraveling
has made itself felt both in the economic crisis that affects many of
Europe's farmers and in a series of food-safety scandals caused by
deregulation and overintensive production. The outbreak of bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in Britain's cattle in the eighties
and its appearance in humans as the fatal new-variant Creutzfeldt-
Jakob disease in the nineties was the most powerful catalyst for the
public's loss of faith in governments and food producers. In one
terrifying package, BSE tied together the new "economical" farming
practices (in this case the feeding of ground-up cow carcasses to
cattle), the easing of health and safety standards, and government's
willingness to lie for the food industry even at the cost of human
lives.
So far, new-variant CJD has killed forty-three people in Britain; the
chief medical officer recently warned that millions may still contract
it from beef they ate fifteen years ago. By some estimates, the whole
affair has cost about $6.5 billion, much of it put up by the European
Union. Elsewhere in Europe, similar stories break with depressing
regularity. Last summer, for instance, a cover-up of dioxin
contamination in animal feed brought down the Belgian government and
part of the Dutch Cabinet and had worried gourmets across the
continent throwing out chickens, eggs and Belgian chocolate to the
tune of $800 million. (The Coca-Cola crisis that followed, in which 30
million cans and bottles of the elixir of life were poured down the
drain after a number of people reportedly fell ill, turned out to be a
genuine case of mass hysteria.) The anxiety is only partly contained
by sideshows like the Anglo-French beef war, in which the British
agriculture minister decided to boycott French food in retaliation for
France's refusal to lift its ban on British beef with the rest of the
European Union--simultaneously publicizing an EU report that found
sewage sludge processed into French animal feed. The happy tabloid
trumpeting that ensued momentarily restored the beef of Old England to
its rightful place as a bulwark against the filthy Frogs, allowing the
Daily Mail to boost its circulation with pictures of cows in berets
and toilet-paper necklaces amid cries of "Just say Non!"
* * *
The biotech companies danced into this minefield with all the grace of
an elephant in jackboots.
Ten years ago, agricultural biotechnology was debated only by what
Labor MP Joan Ruddock (former leader of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament) calls "men in white coats and men in gray suits," with
environmental NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth reporting
on their activities but mounting no large-scale protests. In 1990 the
first GM additive approved for use in British food, a GM baker's
yeast, was swallowed without qualms; so was the GM tomato paste sold
by Sainsbury's supermarket in 1996, at a lower price than its
conventional equivalent. The trouble started that same year when the
American Soybean Association, Monsanto and the US trade associations
told British food retailers that they could not--would not--segregate
American GM soybeans from the conventional kind, undermining the
golden rule of consumer-friendly capitalism: Let them have choice.
Around the same time, media and public awareness of the issue reached
critical mass, and the supermarkets started getting worried letters
from their customers asking them not to use GM ingredients.
The arrogance with which the American biotech firms approached the
European food industry is the stuff of legend. Bill Wadsworth,
technical manager of the frozen-food chain Iceland, recalls a meeting
in September 1997 at which a biotech executive actually said, "You are
a backward European who doesn't like change. You should just accept
this is right for your customers." A few weeks later Wadsworth was on
a plane to Brazil, where he found a grower and processor of non-GM
soybeans and began to set up a vertically integrated supply chain for
Iceland's processed foods. Iceland began to raise the issue's profile
with its customers, pointing out that while Iceland's foods were GM
free, those of the other supermarkets were contaminated. Before long
every supermarket chain in the country was inundated with mail and
phone calls about GM food and had begun to follow suit. In June 1998 a
poll showed that 95 percent of British shoppers thought that all food
containing GM ingredients should be labeled.
* * *
Meanwhile, the field testing of GM crops in Britain by Monsanto,
AgrEvo, Novartis and other companies gave a dramatic focus to the
environmental arguments against genetic modification. Media-savvy eco-
activists in decontamination suits or grim reaper outfits began to
pull up trial plantings and leaflet supermarkets; by the summer of
1998, hardly a week went by without reports of some new, inventive,
nonviolent protest. English Nature, the government's own environmental
watchdog, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds both added
their authoritative voices to calls for a moratorium on planting,
citing the unpredictable and uncontainable dangers of releasing the
new organisms into the ecosystem. Gene transfers could produce
herbicide-resistant "superweeds"; crops genetically engineered to be
toxic to insects might well affect the whole food chain, further
damaging the biodiversity of a landscape already impoverished by
intensive farming. In a country where the membership of environmental
and conservation groups outstrips the membership of political parties
by four to one, the disappearance of cornflowers and skylarks from
fields and hedgerows is a political issue. Prince Charles's entry into
the fray on the side of the green campaigners did much to enhance the
post-Diana credibility of a man who not so long ago was widely
ridiculed for talking to his plants.
By the time Monsanto launched its too-clever-by-half ad campaign to
sell biotechnology to the British public in the summer of 1998, the
bonfire had been prepared. The united front of environmentalists,
shoppers and food retailers, animated in part by fury at the hubris of
multinationals' trying to pull the wool over their eyes, was joined by
an army of development NGOs outraged by Monsanto's efforts to corner
Third World seed markets with a technology that could destroy farmers'
livelihoods while pretending to "feed the world." The spark that lit
the flames was the broadcast that August of a television documentary
about the work of Dr. Arpad Pusztai, a researcher at a government-
funded institute who claimed that feeding GM potatoes to laboratory
rats had slowed their growth and damaged their immune systems. Dr.
Pusztai rapidly lost his job amid assertions that his work was flawed
and incomplete, but the whole affair catapulted GMOs into the tabloid
firmament. With its usual brash enthusiasm The Express launched a
populist crusade against "Frankenfoods," and pretty soon not a man,
woman or child in Britain was left in the dark. The GM controversy
even made The Archers, BBC radio's venerable daily soap about an
English farming family: To the relief of fans everywhere, young Tommy
Archer was recently found not guilty of criminal damage after
destroying a test crop of GM oilseed rape in one of his uncle's
fields.
Downing Street has remained largely unmoved by all this protest,
allowing Tory leader William Hague (who has himself been caricatured
as a genetically modified vegetable) to make political hay out of
Labor's urban unconcern for the environment and dazzled obeisance to
the biotech firms. To Tony Blair, pro-business to his toenails, the GM
revolution is part of the white heat of new technology that will carry
the British economy through the next century. In the words of the
government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Robert May, "We have played
a hugely disproportionate part in creating the underlying science: are
we going to lose it like we lost things in the past?" Dolly the sheep,
after all, was cloned here.
If we do "lose it" in the long run, it will be in part because of the
government's serious misreading of the public mood. Had they proceeded
from the start in an open and careful manner, acknowledging all the
unanswered questions about genetic modification and treating the
population as intelligent citizens instead of superstitious children,
the eventual outcome might have been different. But even if--in some
parallel universe--that had been New Labor's way, the biotech firms
and the American growers in their thrall would never have allowed such
caution. Blair may be predisposed to favor all kinds of high-tech
business; he is also, as the environmentalist and writer George
Monbiot puts it, "having his balls bust by Clinton."
For the United States, Britain is the gateway to Europe--and Europe
is, if anything, even less enamored of biotechnology, despite the
efforts of homegrown firms like Novartis and Zeneca. In Britain,
Germany and elsewhere, resistance to GMOs has been led by green
activists and consumers. In France, it has also involved the
Confidiration Paysanne, the country's second-largest farmers' union
and political home of Josi Bovi, famous for taking apart a new "McDo"
in Millau to protest American food imperialism. Last year Bovi was one
of 120 farmers who destroyed silos-full of Bt corn--a GM variety that
has been shown to affect lacewings, bees, ladybugs and monarch
butterflies--then being grown in France. At his trial Bovi made a
passionate speech explaining his actions: "When were farmers and
consumers asked what they think about this? Never. The decisions have
been taken at the level of the World Trade Organization, and state
machinery complies with the law of market forces.... Genetically
modified maize is...the symbol of a system of agriculture and a type
of society that I refuse to accept. Genetically modified maize is
purely the product of technology, where the means become the end.
Political choices are swept aside by the power of money."
* * *
Since then France has reversed its decision to grow the corn, for
environmental and health-related reasons, and--after a timely
intervention by Greenpeace and activist Jeremy Rifkin with the prime
minister's advisers--has argued for an EU moratorium on further
approvals of GM crops. In spite of stubborn British opposition, the
moratorium is effectively if not officially in place: France, Italy,
Denmark, Greece and Luxembourg have declared that they will block the
issue of any new licenses until new regulations have been agreed. In
addition, all foods sold in Europe that contain a significant
percentage of GM ingredients now have to be labeled--a decision that
immediately rebounded on US agribusiness, pushing giant grain traders
like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to segregate their silos.
* * *
In the war over the fourth agricultural revolution, the first round
seems to have gone to the citizens. But this is only the beginning.
The global food economy is regulated by the awkwardly interlocking
gears of bodies like the EU and the WTO, themselves dominated by
transnational corporations with budgets larger than those of many
small countries. The patterns of competing interests and overlapping
jurisdictions are dizzying. The Anglo-French beef war was partly a
tempest in a teapot over market share, partly a struggle to determine
whether the European Union or France's own freshly minted food-safety
authority gets to vet what French people eat. The Clinton
Administration has used the WTO to declare Europe's exclusion of
American hormone-fed beef illegal (allowing the United States to levy
$117 million in sanctions), and unless the great salon des refusis
that gathered in Seattle wins some significant victories, it will
almost certainly do the same with Europe's attempts to restrict GMOs.
The loyal Blair government has already challenged Europe's de facto
moratorium as a violation of WTO trade rules.
Like all victories, however partial, this one offers valuable pointers
for the future. The opposition to GMOs in Europe has been informed and
led by environmental organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the
Earth--part of the tidal wave of campaigning groups that filled the
vacuum left by government in the neoliberal eighties. But the foot
soldiers who really blocked the biotech firms' confident advance are
the women and men who refused to buy their products--consumers, or
citizens of global capitalism, voting in the only way they can. In the
European movement against GM food, Ralph Nader's old strategy of
organizing consumers at the point of consumption has found its best
vindication yet.
Consumer politics, though, has its limitations. Transnational
corporations are many-headed hydras, with the capacity to sprout new
body parts in the blink of an eye. Once it had seen the writing on the
wall, Monsanto immediately set about regrouping; at a series of closed
meetings with environmental organizations earlier this year, it
offered to use its gene databases to help farmers create new varieties
of crops through traditional crossbreeding methods. Not surprisingly,
Monsanto has also tried to push forward into countries where it
believes people have more pressing worries than the possible risks of
eating GMOs. In Georgia, for example, it held illegal trials of GM
potatoes for two years before being exposed by Greenpeace and Elkana,
a Georgian organic-farming group.
The challenge facing the great Internet-linked coalition of activists
that makes up the new food movement is to keep on thinking globally
while acting locally. In Europe, the GM debate has brought people's
concern about the safety of what they eat to critical mass: British
shoppers' demand for organic food has increased by 40 percent in the
last year, as evidenced by the advance of pricey, rustically packaged
organic produce--70 percent of it imported--along the shelves of
Sainsbury's and Safeway. Farmers are slower to catch up, although some
are trying. The government's program for organic conversion had
exhausted its budget for 1999-2000 by March of this year, in spite of
a $17 million top-up; Labor MP Ruddock has introduced a bill to
increase the amount of land under organic cultivation over the next
ten years. The Iceland chain, ever at the cutting edge, has begun a
drive to provide affordable organic food by buying ingredients from
places where conditions allow intensive cultivation with a minimum of
chemical assistance--for instance, wheat from western Canada. Bill
Wadsworth's strategy for the future is based on extending the
principle of vertically integrated supply--"Grow me my soybeans that
will go into my beefburger." But what will this mean for producers in
poorer countries? Are we looking at a new United Fruit scenario, in
which tropical islands grow wall-to-wall organic pineapples for
Northern supermarkets while their people eat genetically engineered
mush peddled by Monsanto's subsidiaries?
In November nine Indian farmers visited Britain, sponsored by Iceland
and an international exchange group called Farmers' Link. Crammed into
a small meeting room in Westminster, they told Ruddock about their
intense frustration at being shut out of the WTO discussions that will
determine their future. In India, where 75 percent of the population
is directly involved in agriculture, trade liberalization has had a
devastating effect: Importing cheap food means importing unemployment.
"Your people have rejected GM food," said Vivek Cariappa, an organic
farmer from southern India who is active in his country's thriving
anti-GM movement. "Where will it go? It won't go into the sea. It will
go to countries like ours." With careful honesty, Ruddock explained to
the farmers that their British colleagues, on the whole, don't share
their concerns: "Britain has been run as multinational farming
enterprises with subsidies from the CAP. It is mostly people in urban
areas, pressure groups, pushing for change in agricultural practice,
except for a small organic minority." When Juli Cariappa asked if
Britain really wants to leave its food basket in the hands of the
multinationals, Ruddock paused, looked her in the eye, and said,
reluctantly, "Yes."
* * *
If the biotech companies have their way we could soon be on course for
William Gibson's nightmare future, in which the rich eat real food
grown by artisan farmers and the poor eat genetically engineered "vat
stuff" when they eat at all. As long as food is treated as a commodity
like any other and traded to maximize profits, there is little chance
of a reduction in world hunger or of a significantly safer diet for
the fortunate few. As Tim Lang puts it, "We have to see that it is the
production of food that matters, not just its consumption." Or, in the
crisp words of Josi Bovi, "We are faced with a real choice for
society. Either we accept intensive production and the huge reduction
in the number of farmers in the sole interests of the World Market, or
we create a farmer's agriculture for the benefit of everyone." The
shape-shifting global coalition that tripped the advance of
genetically modified crops in Europe and staged the carnival of
protest in Seattle has its work cut out for it. But the genie is out
of the bottle. Food--which in its progress from seed to stomach links
ecology, labor, poverty, trade, culture and health--will be a key item
on the menu of the next century's struggles for democracy against the
arbitrary power of the giant corporations.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Margaronis is a Nation contributing editor living in London.
Thanks to D.D. Guttenplan for additional reporting on this piece.
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