June 18, 2003
Seattle Comes to Sacramento - The anti-globalization crowd's next festival of folly
Ronald Bailey REASON
Trade and agricultural ministers from at least 75 countries are expected to attend the Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology in Sacramento, CA, from June 23 to 25. According to the Department of Agriculture, the gathering "will focus on the critical role science and technology can play in raising sustainable agricultural productivity in developing countries." Sacramento is part of the run-up to the big World Trade Organization ministerial meeting this September in Cancun, Mexico, where negotiators from 180 countries hope to change the way farm goods are traded, among other things.
Of course, wherever trade ministers gather, so too does the anti-globalization "resistance" movement. Activists plan to make Sacramento a practice run for bigger things in Cancun. The protest umbrella group (or should I say website?) Sacramento Mobilization describes the conference as a "meeting to pave the way for 'free trade,' privatization of water, genetic engineering and factory farming." Organizers are "inviting the participation of social justice/human rights/animal rights/and peace activists, workers, students, trade unionists, environmentalists, indigenous groups, artists, community campaigners, consumer advocates, citizens and anyone else who is concerned about the violence and inequality of the corporate economy."
One of their chief targets is plant biotechnology. A group calling itself Northwest Resistance Against Genetic Engineering (NW RAGE) posts a resolution from the Pesticide Action Network's Asian subsidiary, declaring: "Through this meeting transnational corporations (TNCs) will tighten their collaboration with governments to expand the use of the untested and unlabeled products of agricultural biotechnology, which pose extraordinary risks to public health, farmer independence and the environment." This is, in a word, crap.
All crops used to grow biotech foods are tested extensively. In fact, biotech crops are the most thoroughly examined foodstuffs in the history of the world. What the anti-globalization activists want is for biotech foods to pass through the same laborious testing process as pharmaceutical products. Practically no conventional foods?all of which have been greatly modified from their genetic forbearers?could pass such scrutiny.
As for labeling, it is true that the United States does not require foods made with genetically ehnanced ingredients to be identified as such. That's because our food and drug laws require that a product be labeled only if the information is relevant to human health or safety. Sadly, there is one exception to this reasonable rule?organically produced foods. Organic farmers managed to bamboozle the feds into allowing special labeling requirements for their products. Thus, if some consumers get spooked by unfounded activist claims that biotech foods are harmful, they may be lured into buying labeled organic products.
What about those extraordinary risks to public health? Again, complete twaddle. Since being introduced in the mid-1990s, "there has not been a single adverse reaction to biotech food," said Lester Crawford, Deputy Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, at a recent American Enterprise Institute conference in Washington, D.C. "In the meantime," Crawford added, "we've had tens of thousands of reactions to traditional foods." In other words, to the government's knowledge, no one has gotten so much as a sniffle or a stomach ache because of biotech foods.
What about farming independence? Won't farmers, especially poor ones, become mere serfs for biotech multinationals? This attitude treats farmers with condescension, if not contempt. If growers don't find seeds worthwhile, they won't use them. The problem for the activists is that poor farmers who are given access to biotech seeds embrace them with a vengeance.
Consider, for example, the case of insect-resistant cotton in India. The Indian government prohibited cotton that was genetically enhanced to fight off bollworms, but some farmers managed to smuggle in the forbidden seeds. The subsequent crops of biotech cotton performed spectacularly, boosting yields as much as 80 percent, and increasing farmers' cotton-related income by 500 percent. Now the government has approved the seeds.
In Brazil, similarly, farmers have been smuggling in herbicide-resistant biotech soybeans for years. So why won't the activists let poor farmers choose for themselves? Because every time farmers have been given the option, they've jumped at the opportunity to plant genetically modified seeds. That's real independence.
Finally, what risks do biotech crops pose to the environment? Negligible. Biotech strains are hardly threatening to run roughshod over the ecology. All crop plants are pampered and protected from the ravages of wild nature; that's called farming, and it's why we don't see wheat invading our forests, or corn taking over the grasslands. But won't traits like pest-resistance and herbicide-resistance, transferred by cross-breeding to wild plants, create superweeds? Pollen can flow between biotech crops and wild relatives, but the potential to cause environmental problems is minimal.
Meanwhile, by boosting productivity, biotech crops mean that fewer natural forests and grassland areas will have to be plowed under to produce food for a hungry world. Pest-resistant crops use less chemical pesticide, and the future may produce plants resistant to drought, and perhaps even able to self-fertilize. All of which would be enormously beneficial for the environment.
Sacramento should provide us all with a protest preview for Cancun, at which organizers are hoping 150,000 anti-globalizers will show up. So let the protesters dance in the streets of Sacramento. I will defend the right of any idiot to spout whatever nonsense he or she wishes, but the rest of us, including world leaders and business executives, have no obligation to pay any heed to it.
Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent, is the editor of Global Warming and Other Eco Myths (Prima Publishing) and Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet(McGraw-Hill).
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