Feeding the world: GM is not the answer

More than 60 countries endorsed the final report but three of those present refused - Australia, the USA and Canada. Again, Australia sided with our North American GM competitors against our GM-free customers in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

These countries have repudiated GM crops, at least until the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol is fully implemented. It requires the Precautionary Principle to be applied to the international transfer, handling and use of living modified (GM) organisms and the latest negotiations in Bonn will introduce liability for damage. Among the few countries that have not signed the Biosafety Protocol are Australia, the USA and Canada, though it has the backing of more than 140 nations.

But aligning ourselves uncritically with US policy on GM is not in Australia's interests.

The USA has not even taken the first step to protecting the global biodiversity on which human communities depend, by joining the Convention on Biological Diversity. Interviewed before the APEC summit meeting in Sydney last year, one of three items on George W. Bush's agenda was promoting the property rights of US companies.

As the former Chair of CSIRO Professor Adrienne Clarke of Melbourne University lamented, foreign seed, chemical and food processing giants already own patents on most of the genes typically used in GM crops. These are the companies that have pushed farm mechanisation, synthetic chemicals and crop monocultures for the past 50 years, making farms dependent on increasingly scarce and expensive oil.

Using the patent and Plant Breeders Rights systems, their aim is monopoly control of the food and fibre-producing organisms that comprise the global food supply, creating a flow of royalties and profits for themselves.

By adding one gene to crops and animals, developed in the public domain over the past five millennia using traditional breeding, they claim patents for their “inventions” and privatise the global biological commons. In contrast, the GM giants resist all but minimal regulation by claiming their GM products just extend traditional breeding practices and are not radically new. They should not be allowed to have it both ways.

Australian governments have been hyper-optimistic about GM for a long time. In more than 20 years they have pumped billions of dollars of scarce public research and development resources into GM, with few discernible public benefits. It is time for a serious reality check on the costs, benefits and prospects for GM organisms.

The processes of setting research and development priorities must also be democratised so that public interest priorities are adopted. New technologies typically create as many new environmental, health and social problems as they solve and GM techniques are no exception. But the lure of patentable products drives the GM juggernaut onward.

Some Australian governments and research agencies are also the committed partners of transnational GM companies. For instance, the Office of the Premier of Victoria and the Victorian and Queensland Governments are members of the Washington DC-based Biotechnology Industry Organisation (BIO) that promotes GM techniques and GM products world-wide on behalf of the industry.

This week Victorian Premier Brumby will, for the fourth year straight, join 20,000 other delegates at the BIO Conference in the USA, despite ALP faction wars destabilising his leadership, according to journalist Paul Austin (The Age, June 13, 2008). Former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie is on an annual retainer of $250,000 as the Queensland Government's trade ambassador in the USA, particularly to promote GM.

The Howard government told previous Food Summits in Rome (1996 and 2001) that no country should seek to be self-sufficient in food as global free trade in food would resolve shortages. In particular, the Australians sought to pressure the Japanese on domestic rice production, which their government protects. It was claimed that we could supply any rice shortfall. But Australian production is now at such low levels through drought and the cost of water that we import Asian rice - an increasingly scarce and expensive food needed for local consumption. This lack of foresight should be a warning to the Rudd Government that food policy needs urgent review.

The epidemic of obesity and resource wastage in profligate communities is just so obscene that hungry people refuse to be silenced any longer. At long last, we hope that governments are belatedly forced to listen, but how will they act? Typically, they are still backing quick technical bandaid solutions for every problem. This props up the status quo to maintain their privilege and power, and the profits of corporations.

The world's human carrying capacity is fast surpassing the limits of world resources and ecological systems have been reached in all departments - resource depletion and degradation, pollution burden and social decay. Societies that depend on constant growth are all under ecological and economic stress. Human civilisations must now focus on sustainably repairing the dysfunctions in global life support systems and establishing sustainable systems to feed, house and clothe everyone, in perpetuity. We owe it to future generations.

Except as a useful laboratory technique, Genetic Manipulation cannot positively contribute to the process of creating a sustainable society. Our governments must stop right now, wasting scarce research money on GM crops and foods that objective analysis will show are not required and are almost certain to fail.