Nexus - 0501 - New Times Magazine-pages

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... GL@BAL NEWS ... NEWS SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION IN MONSANTO CONSPIRACY Mo: that company that health and freedom activists love to hate, has embarked on one of the most extraordinary and ambitious corporate strategies ever launched. The story begins with a single chemical, glyphosate. Sold to farmers and gardeners as "Roundup", it is the world's biggest-selling herbicide, earning more than US$2 billion last year alone. The company's patent on Roundup runs out in 2000, but, far from sow- ing corporate catastrophe, this event seems likely to enhance Monsanto's market value. For the past 10 years it has cleverly been developing a range of new crops, genetically engineered to resist glyphosate. Spraying with Roundup does not harm these crops, but destroys all the weeds that compete. New patent legislation in Europe and the US allows Monsanto to secure exclusive rights to their production. The first "Roundup-Ready" plant Monsanto released was a genetically engineered soy- abean. Between 50 and 60 per cent of processed foods contain soya, so the potential market is enormous. Alarmed at possible increases in the use of herbicides, as well as the health effects of genetically engineered crops in general, environmentalists and consumer groups in Europe started calling for products containing the new beans to be clearly labelled. But in the US, Monsanto insisted that it would be impossible to keep Roundup-Ready soy- abeans apart from ordinary ones. As the new beans were snapped up by growers in the US, Monsanto began an extraor- dinary round of acquisitions, buying shares in seed and biotechnology companies worth nearly US$2 billion in the past 18 months alone. Among its purchases are companies which produce the famous "Flavr-savr" tomato, own the US patent on all genetic manip- ulations of cotton, and control around 35 per cent of the germlines of American maize. Monsanto is now experimenting with new rice, maize, potato, sugarbeet, rape and cot- ton varieties. It has been suggested that within a few years all the major staple food crops will be genetically engineered. The new products are so attractive to many farmers that Monsanto has managed to get them to sign away their future rights to the seed they grow, and allow the company to inspect their fields whenever it wants. Monsanto's new crops could not have become commercially viable without major leg- islative change. As members of the trade lobby Europabio, Monsanto and the other big biotech companies have mastered the legal climate in which they operate. Despite sig- nificant public opposition, in July Europabio managed to persuade the European Parliament to adopt a new directive, allowing companies to patent manipulated plants and animals. Researchers and lawyers from Monsanto already occupy important posts in the US Food and Drug Administration which regulates the food industry. Only the New York Attorney-General's office has taken the company to task, forcing it to withdraw ads claiming that Roundup is biodegradable and environmentally friendly. But Monsanto has been most successful when appealing to multilateral bodies. Last month, the World Trade Organization (WTO) confirmed its ruling that the European Union can no longer exclude meat and milk from cattle treated with Monsanto's bovine growth hormone, despite protests from farmers, retailers and consumers. Biotech firms are now trying to persuade the WTO to forbid the labelling of genetical- ly engineered foods. Any country whose retailers tell consumers what they are eating would be subject to punitive sanctions. With astonishing rapidity, a handful of companies is coming to govern the global development, production, processing and marketing of our most fundamental commodi- ty: food. The power and strategic control they are amassing will make the oil industry look like a corner shop. More successfully than any other lobby, they are inhibiting the two remaining means of public restraint on their activities: government regulation and genuine consumer choice. This may be the first and last chance we will get to tell the biotechnology companies what we think about their re-engineering—of both the stuff of life itself and the means by which it reaches us. (Source: Reported by George Monbiot; published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September 1997 and The Guardian Weekly, w/e 28 September 1997) dered the 40 pages of documents and agreed to pay Professor Weiner, the author of a book on Lennon, US$200,000 to cover his legal costs. The documents contain many pages of trivial information, including a report in March 1972 that a woman named Linda had taught her parrot to interject with the words "Right On!" whenever a conversa- tion became lively. (Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 September 1997) MASONS ABUZZ OVER ELECTRONIC HANDSHAKES lhe Freemasons' secret handshakes are about to go electronic. Finnish compa- ny Creativesco is patenting "the Kinsmen" (WO 97/24627) which silently alerts mem- bers of a secret society to each other's pres- ence. Transponders are disguised as pendants, watches or badges and emit an agreed code-word while searching for a match in the area. When a match is found, each device sends out an acknowledgement and alerts its owner by vibrating silently. Transmission is low-power, so the alert only works over short distances. After the signal, fellow members can make visual contact with pre-arranged gestures and expressions. The same system could help strangers identify each other in crowds. (Source: New Scientist, 27 September 1997) MAD COW DISEASE JUMPS THE SPECIES BARRIER Acne to some researchers, the new variant-CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob dis- ease) is shaping up to be the plague to end all plagues. Research studies published in Nature (vol. 389, 2 October 1997) reveal that the agent that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or "mad cow dis- ease", has jumped the species barrier. Technically speaking, this agent is still undefined, but the scientific establishment, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that "prion" protein agents are most likely behind it all. In an attempt to establish that prions are indeed the new na: s, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was recently awarded to Dr Stanley Prusiner for his "discovery" of prions. (Source: New Scientist, 4 October 1997. For more info, see our "mad cow" article this issue, plus our review of Deadly Feasts; or visit the web site, www.madcow.com) NEXUS -9 DECEMBER 1997 - JANUARY 1998