By Roberto Verzola
Reality Sandwich | After the Second World War, the chemical industries of the West shifted their attention back to civilian applications, including the large-scale production of synthetic urea, organochlorines, and other fertilizers and pesticides. These agrochemicals were marketed supposedly to provide additional nutrition for farmers' crops and to kill crop pests. However, farmers and governments did not realize that these products also killed, incapacitated, weakened, or otherwise made life difficult for very important but little-known creatures: soil organisms which turned organic matter into natural plant food, and friendly organisms like predators and parasites which kept pest populations in check. These creatures comprised a vast, largely invisible and unrecognized commons which all farmers unknowingly tapped into, every time they planted seeds and grew crops. In their defense, the chemical industry might claim that they did not know either (which would be an admission of recklessness, if not negligence). But this excuse would be untenable by the 1960s, when the chemical industry viciously attacked Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring,[1] which had called attention to the harmful effects of DDT and other agrochemicals on non-target organisms, including human beings.[2]
In effect, the chemical industry was selling farmers and governments a deadly technological Trojan Horse, an anti-abundance poisoned pill. Agrochemicals appeared to offer more abundant harvests; in truth, their deployment would gradually weaken and take the life out of the farmers' biological support systems such as natural sources of plant food and pest enemies. As more agrochemicals were used, the diverse soil populations dwindled, the soil became less fertile and farmers' crops starved. To keep the plants from starving, more synthetic fertilizers were added, which caused the living soil populations to dwindle even further. As the predator and parasite populations likewise dwindled, pest populations went up. So farmers had to spray more pesticides, which then killed even more predators and parasites. More recent studies based on the theory of trophobiosis suggest that synthetic fertilizers actually make plants more attractive to pests.[3]
Farmers who took the poisoned pill were caught in the trap and fell into agrochemical addiction, draining life out of the soil and around the crops.
In the 1960s, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)[4] introduced IR-8, the first of a series of new "high-yielding varieties" (HYV) of rice, whose high yields partly came from their better responsiveness to chemical treatment. Farmers were wary and few were willing to let go of their traditional varieties. Drawn by aggressive government subsidies and lending programs, however, more and more farmers switched. As they did, they also stopped planting their heirloom varieties, which were soon lost as the old seeds they had saved dried up and died. As the heirloom varieties disappeared and HYV-dependence grew, farmers also lost their selection and breeding skills.
Agrochemicals and the new chemically-responsive varieties would eventually be promoted as the "Green" Revolution.[5] Even today, this technological poisoned pill continues to keep millions of farmers addicted to agrochemicals, mired in poverty and debt.
Another facet in the technological substitutions of this period was the gradual replacement of work animals by farm machinery. In the Philippines, for instance, carabaos were the farmers' main source of mechanical power. Carabaos also grazed the less fertile areas around the farm, their dung enriching the soil. The animal usually recovered by itself from injury or sickness. Even more -- perhaps the most amazing thing of all -- the female carabao gave birth to another carabao every two years or so. Yet, through the same poisoned pill strategy, farm machinery suppliers and the government eventually managed to get many farmers to switch to a mechanical power source that was fuelled by costly imported gasoline instead of free grass, gave out noxious pollutants instead of milk and natural fertilizer, required a skilled technician and costly spare parts if it stopped working, and of course never gave birth to its own replacement.
Seed dependence: F1 hybrids
Also in the 1960s, another development would worsen this slippery slide towards seed dependence. U.S. seed companies introduced their commercial version of the F1 corn hybrid developed decades earlier in the public sector.[6] (F1 means the first filial generation after crossing two different parental lines). Unlike heirloom varieties, F1 hybrids did not breed true. When their seeds were replanted, the offsprings' characteristics segregated and the desirable traits were expressed weakly or irregularly in subsequent generations. So, regardless of the benefits the current crop offered, saving seeds became pointless.
Corn farmers had to buy hybrid seeds from the seed suppliers every planting season. Obviously they still had the option to go back to traditional varieties, but government technicians promoted the hybrid varieties aggressively and extended highly subsidized credit to farmers who used them. So the use of F1 hybrids among corn farmers grew.
As more farmers abandoned their traditional corn, these varieties became scarce and gradually disappeared. Commercial hybrid corn varieties eventually dominated the seed corn market, like the HYVs did among rice farmers, but with a difference. If seed buying had been an occasional purchase in the past when seeds produced their own kind, hybrids led to repeat sales season after season, turning seeds into highly profitable commodities.
As the seed business became more profitable, giant agrochemical firms began buying up the seed companies that had established themselves in the market. A similar corporate trend towards F1 hybrids emerged in the vegetable sector and, later, in the rice sector, a trend that continues today.[7] [8] [9]
F1 hybrids mark the beginning of corporate efforts to gain full control over seeds, especially in major staple crops and vegetables. They also represent the first technology in agriculture explicitly meant to end the farmers' age-old practice of saving part of their harvest to use as seed in the next planting season. This counter-productive technology strikes at the very heart of sustainability and the seed commons.
Commercial seed breeders took care that non-hybrid varieties would remain under their control too. Their demand for exclusive rights over varieties they developed eventually gave rise to the 1961 Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants. This convention defined plant breeders' rights, mandated plant variety protection and established an international union, the UPOV, to work for plant breeders' interests. As countries acceded to UPOV agreements, they moved to adopt counter-productive national seed laws that limited the freedom of farmers to exchange seeds or to sell them. Subsequent UPOV agreements (1972, 1978, 1991) became more and more restrictive of farmers' rights.[10]
It was a two-pronged offensive against seed-saving and exchange: the technology of hybrids and new laws and international agreements restricting farmers' options over seeds.
Patenting engineered seeds
In the early 1980s, seed companies learned to directly modify plant genomes through genetic engineering (GE).[11] Then they patented the modified genes, using the patent system -- originally meant for industrial inventions and designs -- to claim exclusive rights over seeds and plants with the patented genes.[12]
This new weapon in the growing corporate arsenal of counter-productive practices was even more restrictive than plant variety protection: the novelty of the technology itself now justified excluding by law everyone from using patented seeds unless they paid some kind of royalty or technology fee.
The first commercially successful applications were soya and canola plants that incorporated herbicidal resistance and corn plants that incorporated pesticidal toxins. For the first time, seed companies held the power to sue farmers who saved the seeds of these crops and planted them in a subsequent season, simply on the strength of the patents they held over the genes incorporated in these seeds.
GE corn was also a poisoned pill, engineered to produce a modified version of a pesticidal toxin from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Organic farmers had used Bt for decades to control corn pests, prudently spraying the cultured bacteria only if pest damage reached significant levels. When the Bt gene was inserted into the corn plant, the resulting Bt corn now expressed the toxin throughout the plant's life, making it more likely for Bt resistance to develop rapidly among the target pests and sabotaging a resource that organic farmers -- the nemesis of the agrochemical/GE industry -- had used for decades.
Terminating a 350-million-year-old cycle of life
Counter-productive technologies now in the pipeline are taking to higher levels the bizarre goal of attacking natural abundance to create artifical scarcity.
The precursor of these technologies is the "Terminator Technology," which genetically modifies plants to make their seeds sterile, ending the 350-million-year-old process of reproduction through seeds. Truly, it is the "death of birth."[13] U.S. patents have been granted, though commercial application seemed a long way off. The real question is: will farmers use them? The idea was so outrageous that its promoters backtracked for a while, trying to find a spin that would make their idea more publicly palatable.
They soon found one. Engineered seeds led to a seemingly intractable problem: genetic contamination. Engineered soya and canola, which survived despite herbicide applications, were showing up in places where they were neither expected nor wanted -- in farms which had used no engineered seeds, especially organic farms where strict safety standards prohibited such seeds. So, on the strength of their patent claims, Monsanto sued. The farmers insisted that they had used no engineered varieties. Yet, some plants in their farm tested positive for Monsanto's patented genes. Many farmers, intimidated by Monsanto's legal and financial muscle, paid the fines and suffered the conseqences such as losing their organic certification. However, in one celebrated case that dragged on for years, Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser stood his ground and fought the legal battle to the end. The Canadian Supreme Court issued an ambiguous decision which each side interpreted as its victory.[14]
Terminator Technology promoters now say that their technology can prevent genetic contamination from engineered crops, by further modifying these crops to produce sterile seeds.
New ideas in the pipeline fine-tune the concept further to allow finer-grained control of sterility. Known as genetic use restriction technologies (GURTs), these will enable the seed companies to control seed sterility in the field through external triggers like a chemical (presumably patented too). By spraying this chemical on a GURT-modified plant, the plant can be induced to turn its sterility (or fertility) on or off -- scarcity and abundance marketed under full corporate control. A similar technology can also be used for turning genetically-engineered traits themselves on or off.
The common thread in these developments is the counter-productive corporate bid to control abundance in agriculture and create artificial scarcity. This opens a market for substitute products and leads to a supply system completely under corporate control through various technological and legal mechanisms.[15]
The use of hybrids and genetic engineering have been justified in the interest of "feeding the world". Yet, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study in 2006 found that 10% of U.S. adults and 17% of children went occasionally hungry for lack of food.[16] If they cannot even sufficiently feed all Americans, how can they feed the world?
Read full article
Recent Comments