The U.S. is gleefully strong-arming its way around the world again -- this time via genetically-modified crops, the rejection of which from the EU would mean the loss of a huge market for U.S. companies.
The Philippines is one of the battlegrounds as well. After the Philippine government allowed the distribution of Monsanto's Bt corn in the country, members of the Philippine Greens and SEARICE, among others, went on a hunger strike to protest. (It ended 21 days later; by then, the Bt corn seeds had been "quietly distributed to corn plantation owners, which have started planting them in North Cotabato and Sultan Kudarat.")
There are two major facets to the conflict over GMOs in the Philippines. The first is simply about questions regarding their safety. Faster evolution of antibiotic-resistant microbes, insecticide-resistant bugs, new allergies -- it all seems like an awfully big chance to take.
But no -- it's because anti-GMO people are backward, and against progress, and paranoid, and "anti-science" (the latter epithet from Dean Jorge Bocobo). (It all sounds suspiciously like modernization-theory rhetoric to me (and yeah, like similar discourse about the Philippines a century ago) -- but I can see some of you rolling your eyes already, so I'll drop it.) Much of this proceeds from the common belief that science, as objective and value-free as it is, is good for you. It sounds so -- dare I say it? -- benevolent.
Pro-GMO folks also love citing the statistic that "genetically modified crops account for 75 percent of U.S. soybeans and 34 percent of American corn." This is hardly reason to jump on the bandwagon just yet; obviously not everything good for the U.S. can be good for the rest of the world, as Monsanto's P.R. people learned from angry European farmers. (You can read more (eloquently written, but objectionable to me) pro-GMO screeds at Belmont Club and at Bocobo's blog Philippine Commentary -- the links are probably screwed, as with a whole bunch of blogspot blogs, so I didn't post the entry links, but they're in the archives.)
Meanwhile, Jeanne d'Arc drops this little bomb, which brings me to the second facet of contention: the fact that a dependence on genetically modified crops -- almost all of which are produced in the United States -- would almost certainly foster a dependence on foreign capital as well. Now, I'm no economist, but I think it's clear who's lining whose pockets here. Even USAID, which has been actively pushing for higher integration of biotechnology into the Third World, says so on their website:
The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80 percent of the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID's) contracts and grants go directly to American firms.I'm not one of those people who rail against multinational companies per se -- a strategy sometimes carelessly deployed by activists of my youth, who saw every MNC as threatening national economic sovereignty, whatever that meant -- but there is something troubling about the eager embrace of a product that seems so inherently risky and seems so clearly meant to reap profits for American biotechnology companies. Science or pseudo-science aside -- and yes, unhelpful scare tactics are used by the anti-GMO camp as well -- there is a very clear economic and political agenda all wrapped up here, encapsulated in a few grains of corn. If the crops will actually save Filipinos from starvation, then they should benefit from it, by all means. But let's not pretend that lots of money will be made in what will obviously be a monopoly -- and at whose expense? Posted by the wily filipino at May 25, 2003 07:57 PM