GM-free Scotland

News | Marriage of the giants

The prospect of increasingly limited crude oil stocks and rising concern about the deleterious effects of oil end-products has sent oil companies in search of business elsewhere.

Oil giant, BP, has announced it is 'joining some of the world's best science and engineering talent to meet the demand for low-carbon energy'. And what better way to produce 'clean, renewable energy' than 'through the development of better crops'. That's GM crops.

To kick-start this project, BP has offered to donate $500 million of research funding over 10 years to the University of California at Berkeley, in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chevron has done a similar deal in the University of California Davis.

BP's contribution will represent about 3% of the University's external research funding budget, the remainder coming from the taxpayer via the federal government. The donation is a very small investment for BP, but is likely to be the life blood of laboratories working on the project which are only allowed to survive if they are attracting funding.

That the deal is a cause for concern is clearly recognised by the University administrators who have tried to avoid public scrutiny of their decisions and have taken steps to disrupt the students' right to demonstrate on campus (this at the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement!).

The concerns surrounding the proposal are wide-ranging, in particular regarding the actual science which will be emerging from the University. 'Science' which is answerable to commercial interests, whose future is made dependent on external providers, which is not free to publish nor bound by the peer review process, and whose agenda is to create patentable products, is probably not actually science. There will be no obligation to undertake expensive assessments of effects on our food and water supplies, the environment nor subsistence farming. Indeed, current GM crops earmarked for biofuel production are highly dependent on artificial fertilizers and pesticides which, in turn, depend on oil. The use of ethanol as fuel is, itself, problematic since it can't be shipped in pipelines but must be trucked and is far from an efficient fuel (see BIOFUELS: THE SUMS DON'T ADD UP - News, May 2007).

One of the biggest concerns is that while industry controls the agenda in the university laboratories, and demands research which may lead to a complete dead-end, too little scientific attention and cash will be channeled to finding a solution to global warming.

What we are witnessing is a consolidation of all major industries: the agribusiness has reduced itself to three main players (ADM, Cargill and Bunge), the biotech industry has reduced itself to four main players (Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dupont), the petroleum business has reduced itself to three main players (BP, Shell and TOTAL), and the automotive and pharmaceutical businesses are undergoing the same relentless consolidation. Now these giants are aligning with each other through GM crops.

COMMENT All of these industries have expertise in chemicals and engineering, storage, transport, marketing and salesmanship: not one has any developed expertise in biological sciences, and since life has an irritating tendency to be unpredictable and uncontrollable, they probably don't want to know.

During a presentation to the University Senate, Professor Ignacio Chapela described what would emerge from the BP-Berkeley laboratories: “a large number of genetically altered, reproducing, living organisms to be released in the public environment: in Berkeley, in the Midwest and around the world, genetically modified grasses, trees, algae, bacteria, viruses, destined for intentional, large-scale release in the public environment. These organisms do not represent Science. If anything, they may represent our failure as scientists to assume the deep inadequacies of our understanding about living organisms and the ecology of our planet. Despite a third of a century and more that $350 billion dollars invested in the trinket, a hurricane remains more predictable, and a wildfire remains more controllable, than GMO organisms.”

The whole machinery is, predictably, being well-oiled by propaganda. Monsanto has taken the trouble to commission a report, dutifully described by the press as a 'new study ... published in peer-reviewed journal AGBioForum', which claims that in 2005, GM crops reduced CO2 emissions by 9 billion kilograms, equivalent to removing nearly 4 million family cars from the road. This was achieved by planting herbicide-tolerant GM crops using conservation tillage in which the ploughing responsible for releasing CO2 into the air is avoided, and by insect-resistant GM crops which need less spraying.

OUR COMMENT


Regular readers of GMfreeScotland.net will be aware of the (real) studies which have found that chemical use on GM insect-resistant crops only decreases during the initial three years, and that herbicide tolerance is not necessary for conservation tillage. The Journal of AGBioForum is funded by the Illinois-Missouri Biotechnology Alliance whose purpose is “to fund biotechnology research ... directed at expanding the volume of profitable business in the US food and agriculture sector”; this might make you question whose peers the reviewers of Monsanto's report actually were.

If you are wondering if we have any alternatives to the US-led obsession with GM crops to beat global warming, there are lots we could be putting our attention on, for example:

Although any new technology which might boost the above alternatives would be patentable, the really big bucks only attach to GM crops because then the raw material itself is patentable, and, each one is infinitely replaceable by a newly patented version when the old patent expires.

Other unsustainable, but possibly useful stop-gap measures to reduce carbon emissions include 'clean coal technology', also under investigation by BP, which involves reducing or filtering emissions, or pumping waste into spent oil-fields.

If you know any US citizens in the areas in which BP is active, raise some awareness there that the integrity and credibility of their universities is being compromised by commercial hijackers, and, that their taxes are subsidising the whole business. Tell them that the 'Stop BP at Berkeley' campaign could use their help: check out www.stopbp-berkeley.org

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