Although a consumer boycott and loads of direct crop-trashing action has seen off genetically modified foods in the UK (for now), last year the area used for worldwide GM crops rose by more than 11%.

2004 saw the biggest increase in GM planting since 1998, with the US, Argentina, China, India and Spain leading the pack. The corporate PR has shifted slightly from the earlier spin that GM ‘can feed the world’; agribusiness now flogs the idea of ‘nutrigenomics’ - arguing that food should be thought of like a drug offering a solution to a prescribed disease. “As basic science advances and converges with e-commerce,” comments one industry leader, “new opportunities will emerge to provide consumers, whose genetic susceptibility to specific diets and diseases are known, with products tailored to individual dietary needs.” Oh yes, Biotech business is booming; profits are stable and revenues increased tenfold between 1990 and 2005.

Worse still, heavyweight economies like Japan and the US have successfully stalled attempts by developing counties to wrestle back control of their indigenous genetic resources, paving the way for the continued privatisation of our ecosystem.

Although UK plc is actively considering allowing crop trials for GM spuds next spring, the real cash to be made is from looting developing countries so poor they’ll even borrow from loan sharks like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The loans come with the usual strings in the tail, such as forcing borrowers to open their borders to foreign investment i.e privatise everything. Countries are then forced to export cash crops to earn hard currency needed to meet repayments on the loans. Big bucks are made in boom crops like winter greens, mainly exported to the US, which cause countries to switch from cultivating subsistence foods to these money-makers.

Argentina, for example, has increased its production of GM Roundup Ready Soya by more than 50% and exports more than 90% of the stuff. The growth of the soya bean has led to a fall in the growing of other staples, which are increasingly being imported. In what was once the 7th richest country in the world, the number of people going hungry has doubled since 2001.

Now able to invest freely, the corporations are putting local farmers out of business as farmers are unable to compete with such technologically advanced (and state subsidised) multinationals. Unemployed farmers head to the cities to look for work; ironically the very people who once grew their own food are now starving. In a world of food surplus another 37 million people were added to the ‘official’ number of hungry during the 1990s. Whilst almost 60 percent of the population of Central Africa is undernourished, in 2004 consumers in the UK threw away between 30 and 40 percent of the food they bought or grew, worth up to £16bn.

And Biotech is not going away - it’s the approach which can maintain the corporate stranglehold on a food production system in crisis. By the mid 1970s it was already taking one calorie of energy to produce one calorie of food. 30 years later and it can take ten times the amount of fossil fuel. And if you like to chow on cow it’s gonna cost 300 calories for every one calorie of beef munched. Energy consumption is on the increase, partly because our lust for out of season exotic fare means that winter aubergine has travelled a long carbon-wasting journey to get into your ratatouille. But the real problem is the growing demand for the fertilizers and pesticides which are derived from dwindling oil supplies. And its a pointless arms race - pests become resistant to the effects of pesticides, agribusiness develops new and more potent poisons, to which pests eventually become resistant as well... This toxic spiral degrades the soil, pollutes the water supply and is causing cancer amongst the poor farmers who spray crops and nearby downwind residents. But the fightback is scoring some victories.

CUBA SQAURES OFF

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Cuba (SchNEWS’ favourite police state) lost three quarters of its subsidised chemical and pesticide imports. When the oil ran dry, tractors rusted in the fields and crops went unharvested. The average Cuban lost 20lbs in weight. Local farmers responded by adopting low energy organic food production techniques more in tune with nature, such as companion planting, natural pest controls and composting on a monstrous scale. At community level there has been a boom in urban agriculture that now sees up to half of Havana’s vegetable consumption grown in the city. Now Cubans are amongst the best fed in Latin America with a bigger boost in calorie consumption during the 1990s than just about any other country in the world, including the gutbustin ol’ US of A.

In 2004, Bayer Crop Sciences finally pulled out of India. US farmers launched an action against the same company in August for failing to prevent its GM rice, which has not been approved for human consumption, from entering the food chain. Similar class actions are taking place in Australia against secret GM trials that threaten to contaminate non-GM crops. Ethiopia has been making real progress on tackling hunger, not thanks to the antics of Gob Beldof and Bono Inc., but because of the boom in small localised self-sufficient production. Zambia, meanwhile, has declared itself to be a GM free zone, as have municipalities in Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia.

Such successes would not have been possible if it were not fo local communities ability and determination to resist agribusiness. Perhaps this is why there is such a fight going on within the World Trade Organisation to prevent the greedy multinationals extending their grip even fuither. For some time farmers in poorer countries have been arguing that agreements on Trade Related aspects of Intellectual property (TRIPS see SchNEWS 420) should not interefere with their right to grow whatever food they want and need.

Responding to complaints about multinationals ‘bioprospecting’ around the globe, the UN introduced the Convention on Biological Diversity. This meant there had to be ‘prior informed consent’ and benefit-sharing when a multinational tried to exploit local genetic resources. But the US and Japan disagree. They’ve been busy opposing the plan, and at the most recent Convention meeting managed to stall proposals to regulate the patenting of natural resources - persuading delegates that the most pressing issue worthy of discussion was “how to proceed with the negotiations” which won’t now start until gone 2010.

Turning the screw a little tighter, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab declared in August that the US would also be reviewing its trade-incentive scheme and is considering cutting the benefits for a list of countries; a list that curiously reads like a who’s who of the larger economies that have been battling US negotiators at the WTO.

The consequences of not keeping informed are clear; in the US, according to a 2003 study by Food Policy Institute, only half of respondents were aware that GM foods were on sale and almost two thirds didn’t really know what biotechnology was. The US grows 50m hectares of GM crops, three times more than the next biggest grower, Argentina. keep up with the latest info at www.geneticsaction.org.uk and www.grain.org

* Check the Soil Association’s Green Directory at www.soilassociation.org for how to eat locally. Tim Lang’s and Michael Heasman’s “Food Wars” is good on Biotech philosophy and the green fight-back (Earthscan press, 2005) and Angus Wright’s classic exposure of pesticide misuse, “The Death of Ramón González” was re-released last year by the University of Texas Press.

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