by Steve Kerr
Genetically modified (GM) food and organisms, we are told, offer us a new era of bounty. But the debate over these foods is really about political and economic power and control.
Issues of public health and safety currently dominate public discussion.
But the question of GM food is fundamentally an issue of political control of food production for multinational corporations. There is no other reason to develop genetically modified organisms.
Proponents of genetic engineering cite the problems of famine and poverty as "humanitarian" justification for rapid and unaccountable development and deployment of genetic technology.
But these justifications are the biological equivalent of "humanitarian bombing".
Genetic technology is the ultimate weapon of global capitalism against small farmers and a direct threat to human health.
Famine
Central to this is the myth that famine and starvation are problems that can be solved by genetic engineering. This is nonsense.
There is more than enough food on earth to feed the current population. Poverty and famine are political problems, the result of gross injustice and the inequitable distribution of world resources.
The struggle against GM foods must therefore be seen as part of the larger political struggle of the working class against capitalism.
If corporations patent organisms and if food production is centralized in the hands of multinational agribusiness, they will have at their disposal the ability to use famine and its threat as a powerful tool of domination and control.
Genetic technology is a license to print money and to make tomorrow's bombs.
Corporations have been busy for years sequencing the genetic codes of "useful" animals and plants.
In the US, corporations have even patented whole organisms, conferring upon themselves "ownership" of species by virtue of their insertion or manipulation of a single gene.
This most arrogant act threatens billions of years of slow evolution as species adapted to changing conditions on Earth. It is the ultimate logic of a capitalism that seeks to supplant every natural relationship with an alienated and artificial one, mediated by money.
Staple plants such as cotton, tomatoes, potatoes, rapeseed, wheat and corn are all being genetically modified.
We use them every day and there are no labels warning us that we are guinea pigs in a cowardly new experiment.
The genes of these plants are sequenced or coded by scientists in a process that is hugely expensive and directly subsidized through public funds.
The knowledge thus produced, far from being public property, is kept secret as the "intellectual property" of corporations such as Monsanto.
Where such knowledge is in the public sphere, the right to control the altered gene is private in order to safeguard the future profits of the corporation. The effect on humans of eating genetically altered foods is not even being seriously studied.
Farmers in the third world and in Canada are under direct threat from such companies as Monsanto which licenses the right to plant its seeds and then uses Pinkerton agents to spy on farmers who are suspected of collecting seed from patented species.
The collection of seed stock from crops for replanting the next season is how farmers everywhere have planted crops and ensured their survival since we learned how to farm.
The biotechnology corporations now want to get in the middle of these natural processes, which until now have remained outside the money economy.
Of course there are pitfalls on the road to this new gilded age.
Genetic modification of plants in order to make them resistant to natural pests threatens species diversity, and could turn crops into uncontrollable weeds.
Free of natural predators, such species would move into niches occupied by "weaker" plants who do not posses the new super genetic resistance.
Monsanto has patented a new and potentially lethal genetic technology called the "terminator gene", which renders the seeds of a plant sterile.
This technology perfectly illustrates the goals of the biotech industry; unfettered power and control over life for profit.
The wide deployment of this technology would render farmers the indentured servants of the seed company, unable to plant sterile seeds, and forced to repurchase seed stock from Monsanto each year.
The terminator gene could also escape into the gene pools of "wild" plant species, wiping them out in a generation or two, never to return. The sad thing is that we have had this public debate before, in the mid 1960s over a new wonder drug called Thalidomide.
Concerned yet?