Ethiopia goes organic to feed herself - The Institute of Science In ...

"Silicon Valley of agricultural
biotech."
Yet the industry didn't retain a
stronghold there: a consumer backlash
against GM food, along with
high-profile industry blunders such
as the StarLink contamination incident,
nipped investor enthusiasm in
the bud. In 2000, the Novartis
Agricultural Discovery Institute was
folded into Syngenta. Then in 2002,
Syngenta closed the La Jolla, San
Diego unit. Other San Diego agricultural
biotechs also disappeared.
Mycogen was purchased by Dow
Chemical, and Akkadix Corp. faded
from the scene. Dow retains a
research unit in San Diego, but
moved a second agbiotech unit out
of the state.
Biotech medicines a refuge of
hope
Biotech drugs have long provided a
refuge of hope for investors wary
about the prospects for agricultural
biotech. The promise of lucrative
magic bullets against intractable diseases
attracted those who kept faith
in the genetic determinist model of
illness. Biotech pioneers stoked
investor enthusiasm by arguing that
since biotech drugs are often versions
of human proteins, genetic
engineering could cut short the long
safety trials that traditional drugs go
through. But that didn't turn out to be
the case, and most genetically engineered
medications take 10 to 15
years to win approval, much the
same as other drugs.
At the turn of the millennium,
hopes rose with the hype when the
deciphering of the human genome
appeared to herald a new age of
treatments tailored for individual
genetic differences. This sparked an
incredible 170% rise in biotech stock
prices in just four months - followed
by a steep crash over the next year.
By 2002, disillusionment had set in.
Canadian magazine Maclean's
reported, in an article called
"Biotech hope and hype: The genetics
revolution has failed to deliver",
"Federal and provincial governments
have long had a love affair with
genetics, pumping billions into the
biotech biz… 20 years later and how
many breakthrough products has
biotech produced? Gene therapy
may actually have harmed more
people than it's helped. … The few
drugs derived from GE such as
insulin simply replace existing products
while creating new risks."
Bad-idea virus
We've seen how one lifeline for a
largely unprofitable industry is selling
stocks. Another is public money.
The BIO conference, reported
Associated Press, was packed with
mayors and governors from across
the US desperate to lure biotech
companies to their area with promises
of tax breaks, government grants,
even help with parking. Yet biotech,
wrote the AP, "remains a money-losing,
niche industry firmly rooted in
three small regions of the country:
'This notion that you lure biotech to
your community to save its economy
is laughable,' said Joseph Cortright,
a Portland, Ore. economist who cowrote
a report on the subject. 'This
is a bad-idea virus that has swept
through governors, mayors and economic
development officials.'”
A case in point is Florida governor
Jeb Bush, brother of president
George W. Bush. Jeb Bush spearheaded
an initiative to hand over
$510 million of Florida and Palm
Beach County taxpayers' money to
build a new biotech centre for the
Scripps Research Institute, based in
San Diego. Land, buildings, labs,
offices, equipment, even employees'
salaries for seven years: Scripps got
it all for free, putting in no money of
its own. The company will eventually
repay Florida up to $155 million, half
of the state's investment. But the
payback provision will not kick in
until 2011. Bush and other Florida
officials hope that Scripps will make
Florida a biotech hub - like San
Diego.
The wisdom of using San Diego
as a model is questionable, given
the industry's record of failure there.
But Bush seems blind to the risks.
"It's always good to have sceptics,
but I like to be on the dreaming
side," he told the press. "It's a lot
more fun on the dreaming side of the
road."
According to a report prepared
for BIO and released at its annual
convention in San Francisco, at
least 29 states have formal plans to
woo the biotech industry. Many, like
Pennsylvania, are using money
gained from the global tobacco settlement
to fund biotech development
projects.
How does this "bad-idea virus"
gain such a hold over so many? In
an article in Nature Biotechnology,
medical bioethicist Leigh Turner of
McGill University, Quebec, suggests
that biotech fulfils many of the same
needs as religious fanaticism:
"Biotech, in a similar manner to
many religious movements, has its
charismatic prophets, enthusiastic
evangelists and enrapt audiences.
Like religions, it offers a comforting
message of salvation. Instead of
imagining a day of rapture when the
dead rise from their graves to begin
eternal life, biotech enthusiasts
imagine the era when medical technologies
provide a renewable, largely
imperishable body. … Biotech is
not just an assemblage of research
programs and techniques. In a scientific
and technological era, biotech
also offers a surrogate religious
framework for many individuals."
Within this framework, it is a
small step to the type of language
found in the Nuffield Council report
and repeated by biotech 'evangelists'
such as Derek Burke, which
insists on the "moral imperative for
investment into GM crop research in
developing countries". And once that
article of faith is swallowed, it is but
another small step to appropriating
public money to promote and export
biotech to the third world under the
guise of aid and development programmes.
As private finance for biotech
dries up, the industry is increasingly
turning to government to provide
investment to force the crops the
West doesn't want into Africa and
Asia. The British government has
already quietly sunk over £13m of
public money into such projects via
the Department for International
Development during a period of
intense domestic disquiet over GM.
It has also sunk further money,
along with USAID, into the Nairobibased
African Agricultural
Technology Foundation (AATF) project
to push GM crops into Africa.
What is so insidious about this,
as Dr Tewolde Berhan Gebre
Egziabher, the head of Ethiopia's
Environmental Protection Authority,
has noted, is that "the moral imperative
is in fact the opposite. The policy
of drawing funds away from lowcost
sustainable agriculture
research, towards hi-tech, exclusive,
expensive and unsafe technology is
itself ethically questionable. There is
a strong moral argument that the
funding of GM technology in agriculture
is harming the long-term sustainability
of agriculture in the developing
world."
Nobody should be in any doubt
that the GM lobby's real aim has little
to do with feeding the hungry. It is
to shore up GM research in the UK
in the face of industry's current
retreat, to associate the technology
in the official mind with the public
interest, and to give GM's public
relations campaigns a charitable
face.
SiS