09.11.98 00:14
Little benefit to farmers from GM crops? - Farmers Weekly
Sender: nlpwessex@bigfoot.com
BASF is the latest agrochemical giant to commit itself to
investment in GM
crops. Strict contracts will dictate production methods and
severely limit
the farmer's share of any added value the new crops offer to food
processors
and retailers, according to Friedrich Vogel, head of BASF's crop
protection
business (Farmers Weekly 6 November 1998):
"Farmers will be given just enough to keep them interested
in growing the
crops, but no more. And GM companies and food processors, will
say very
clearly how they want the growers to grow the crops."
Under the headline "GM contracts too restrictive"
Farmers Weekly (p.73) says
this is further evidence that farmers could derive little benefit
from
genetically modified crops.
On 25 October the New York Times Sunday Magazine published a
major article
on Monsanto's GM Newleaf Potatoes. Steve Young is a progressive
and
prosperous US potato farmer who grows Newleaf. In addition to his
10,000
acres he has
a share in a successful fertiliser distributorship. After asking
him about
the contract
Monsanto has made him sign the journalist asked him if he saw a
downside to
biotechnology. After a long pause his answer was: "There is
a cost. It gives
corporate
America one more noose around my neck."
In the same article, Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of
corporate
communications was quoted as saying: "Monsanto should not
have to vouchsafe
the safety of
biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as
possible.
Assuring its safety
is the F.D.A's [Food and Drug Administration] job."
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European consumers have already clearly stated that they do not
want GM food
products, and now the biotech industry (via BASF) is effectively
on record
as saying farmers will be no better off either.
The article in Farmers Weekly is the first in this particularly
influential
British agricultural journal to indicate that UK Farmers may
(like their
colleagues in France who have been protesting against GM crops
for sometime)
at last be realising that they are simply being used as pawns in
a very
large corporate game, where only the industrial components of the
food chain
are the winners.
This year's Countryside march in London was a protest by over
200,000 people
about urban values starting to predominate in the countryside. GM
crops,
and the industry which goes with them, are quintessentially about
(amongst
other things) the spread of urban values into the countryside.
Anyone who
marched in London in the spring should do so again on the
specific issue of
GM crops before farmers are turned into nothing more than
franchisees of the
urban corporate food industry on their own land.
A march by farmers on this issue will regain much of the respect
they have
lost (thanks to the influence of the industrial elements within
the food
chain) in recent years in the eyes of consumers, who are clearly
against the
introduction of this technology. It is time to shorten the food
chain, and
to bring farmers and consumers together.
As with BSE, unless farmers take action on this issue in time the
regretable
and entirely avoidable "mutual respect gulf" between
them and consumers
will widen further, and both will be the looser.
Keep Britain Farming - Keep Britain GMO Free!!
Please forward this message to your farming friends.
For more information on the problems the introduction of GM crops
is causing
farmers in America and elsewhere visit our web site at
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex
(Natural Law Party Wessex)