GM-free Scotland

July '08 | Saving the Polish countryside

GM: A SYMBOL OF MODERNISATION

Polish marketPoland entered the EU in 2004 after an intense campaign to persuade the people to “Say Yes to the EU”. Brash promises were made of the “pots of gold” to be showered on the country with generous agricultural subsidies and free advice for farmers.

The EC committee responsible for negotiating Poland's agricultural terms of entry into the EU put its policy in a nutshell: “The EU is simply not interested in small farms”. In a country where 22% of the working population are involved in agriculture, and the majority of these are on small farms, this was ominous news.

The chairman of the Committee explained it thus “... Our objective is to ensure that farmers receive the same salary parity as white collar workers in the cities. The only way to achieve this is by restructuring and modernising old fashioned Polish farms to enable them to compete with other countries agricultural economies and the global market. To do this it will be necessary to shift around one million farmers off the land and encourage them to take city and service industry jobs to improve their economic position. The remaining farms will be made competitive with their counterparts in western Europe.”

The reality of EU membership for farmers was described by The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside as “... Spend hours out of your working day filling in endless forms, filing maps and measuring every last inch of your fields, tracks and farmstead; applying for 'passports' for your cattle and ear tags for your sheep and pigs; re-siting the slurry pit and putting stainless steel and washable tiles on the dairy walls; becoming versed in HASAP hygiene and sanitary rules and applying them where any food processing was to take place; and living under the threat of convictions and fines should one put a finger out of place or be late in supplying some official details.” Small farmers haven't the time or finances to devote to this level of bureaucracy. The EU sanitary and hygiene regulations are effectively hidden weapons of mass destruction of farmers.

The Polish livestock industry is suffering the same fate as its agriculture. Traditional pig farmers have lost their livelihoods to a predatory multinational. Giant pig factory farms employing a cheap Polish workforce are flooding the market with GM-soya fattened pigs. Large-scale, uniform crops and meat factories which can be regulated from gene to fork are what GM is all about. They are also what the EU is all about. Consumer rejection of GM food has never figured in EU plans. The EU response to consumers who won't play ball is not to give them the non-GM food they want, but to introduce a whole new raft of regulations whose net effect is to shore up the food they don't want.

These regulations have been devised using advisory expert groups over-filled with industry lobbyists, and a notable lack of transparency. Commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel describes on her blog how the EU GM regulations will be applied: “ ... where science has given a product a clean bill of health, that fact must be paramount as we follow the authorisation procedure ...” Unfortunately, the bulk of this 'science' comes from industry itself. When the 'science' comes from elsewhere, the bill of health is not so clean. Recently, the independent science which tested the pollen of one insecticidal GM maize (Bt176) on one species of butterfly, found it to be highly detrimental. The implications were dismissed, without further testing, for the apparently spurious reason that the total butterfly population was unlikely to be affected. (COMMENT Indeed, avoiding testing seems the only way science can be 'used' to give GM crops and food a clean bill of health.)

A recent EU-wide 'consultation' with farmers prior to drafting regulations was carried out using an online questionnaire, in English. This effectively barred the majority of farmers, who do not have the internet and do not speak English, from taking part.

Prior to entry into the EU, Poland had its own precautionary laws on GMOs. The year it joined the Community, Monsanto started a major lobbying drive on senior figures in the Polish government for a relaxation of national GMO precautionary laws and a government commitment to supporting the development of GMOs as a symbol of the modernisation of traditional Polish farming.

However, the people of Poland have rebelled. Over the space of a year and a half, every province in Poland (there are 16) has declared itself a 'GMO-free zone'. Led by its people, the Government proposed a ban on the import and sale of GMO seeds and plants, followed later by a declaring that GM animal feed would also be banned.

The country is, of course, encountering a huge backlash from the European Commission and corporate interests, and the Polish media, largely in foreign hands, can be controlled.

OUR COMMENT

There you have it. The EU in a symbolic GM nutshell.

If you have friends or relatives in Poland, ask them to consider supporting the work of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside. Its activities aim to empower farmers to take back control of their lives, for example, its 'Save Poland's Seeds' awareness-raising campaign among farmers and gardeners aims to protect the indigenous seed base at this time of increasing corporate piracy, modification and ownership of native seeds. Check out www.icppc.pl.

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