Since there seems to be an interest in the present dangers over
genetically modified/manipulated foods, I will try to post as many
articles as I can on the issue. The Guardian has been reporting on the
whole controversy quite in depth for the last few months.

Boxed in by 'free trade' agreements, the Government is powerless to stop
biotech giants putting GM foods on the market

By John Gray

Guardian Tuesday March 2, 1999
The Government's defence of GM food marks a watershed in its history. Over
the past few weeks it has had to confront an inconvenient truth. The
global free market has become a political liability.

In what is likely to be a pattern in British politics over the coming
years, the initiative lies now with parties and pressure groups that voice
the public's reasonable fears about the costs and risks of global
capitalism.

Over the past month, the imperatives of global markets have been on a
collision course with public opinion. British consumers do not want
genetically modified food and it is proving impossible to persuade them
that they do. Only this week the Advertising Standards Authority ruled
that GM food advertising by the biotechnology giant Monsanto was
misleading. However, the finding is not likely to have much effect on the
long-term future of GM food in Britain.

The public believes that scientific knowledge of the effects of GM food is
in its infancy. Rightly, it suspects that little is known of its risks to
human health and next to nothing about its effects on the environment.
There is a deep-seated public view that, given these limitations of our
knowledge, it is better to be safe than sorry.

Pooh-poohing the risks of GM food has proved to be self-defeating. The
British electorate is notably resistant to the combination of wild-eyed
techno-utopianism and stock market-fuelled greed that, together with
incessant lobbying by the genetic-industrial complex, has effectively
stifled debate on genetic engineering in the United States.

It is unwilling to defer to the authority of politicians who tell them
they are ignorant, hysterical and blind to undreamt-of prospects of
progress. This is something even the benighted Tories have understood. In
the government, it is a truth that only Michael Meacher seems to have
grasped.

Wiser than its leaders, the public cleaves instinctively to the
precautionary principle which says that we should avoid catastrophic
risks, however small or incalculable they may be, wherever we can. It is
especially unwilling to incur such risks for the sake of a product for
which it knows there is little, if any, real demand. It cannot shake the
suspicion that what GM food really promises is a stream of undreamt-of
profits for the companies that produce it.

What the public has yet to understand is that there is not a great deal
that the Blair government, or any other government, can do about GM food.
Like nearly every other country, Britain has signed up to international
agreements on free trade. These treaties have had the effect of putting
issues such as the import of genetically modified foods beyond the reach
of democratically elected national governments.

Of course, that is what they were meant to do. The treaties that led up to
the establishment of the World Trade Organisation were drafted and
negotiated at a time when neo-liberalism was regarded not as a rather
cranky political doctrine but as a body of unchallengeable truths.

The WTO is an embodiment of the neo-liberal tenet that 'free trade' should
be insulated from any possibility of democratic accountability. There is
little doubt that it will view the action of any national government in
preventing the sale of GM food as an interference with free trade.

In the best of circumstances, the problems surrounding new genetic
technologies would be difficult. Under the current regime of global
laissez-faire, they are practically insoluble. Even a ban on GM foods in
Britain would not protect us from all of the risks that are incurred in
producing them.

If, despite threats of legal action from biotech companies, some national
governments succeed in prohibiting the sale of their products, the
companies will simply relocate elsewhere. In the present, semi-anarchic
global regime, they will easily find other countries that are more
compliant.

There they can proceed with the manufacture of GM crops, creating dangers
to the environment not only in the countries in which the crops are
produced but wherever their effects extend. Today that could

On this crucial issue the Government cannot respond to the anxieties of
the electorate. Like governments elsewhere, it is boxed in by a framework
for the world economy constructed in the neo-liberal period.

To be sure, there is nothing eternal about the current organisation of
global capitalism. It, too, will pass - perhaps quite soon. But what will
have been its cost in needless human suffering? And how much irreversible
damage will have been done to the environment?



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