Alternatives International

Raspberries for Monsanto Eggplants

GRAIN — 2010-06-02T17:53:57Z

Monsanto's plans to push genetically modified (GM) food crops in Asia ran into a wall on February 9, 2010 when India's Environment Minister put a moratorium on the introduction of a variety of GM brinjal (eggplant) containing Monsanto's patented Bt gene.

China too has been hesitant to approve GM food crops, notably GM rice. It appears that these Asian governments, both outspoken proponents of GM agriculture, are not only feeling the heat from their people's strong resistance to GM food crops but are also being forced to think twice about turning their seed supplies over to Monsanto and the other foreign transnational corporations (TNCs) that control the global GM seed market. What they seem to be saying is, “Yes, we want GM seeds, but we want our public institutions to be involved in their development to safeguard the national interest.” It's a pretty hollow argument, given how “public” research is in bed with corporate interests these days and how removed GM agriculture is from the needs of Asia's farmers. For Asia's small farmers is there really any difference between a national GM crop and a transnational one?

A fuzzy line between public and private in China

In his report imposing a moratorium on Bt brinjal, the Indian Environment Minister referred, amongst other things, specifically to India's lack of a “large-scale publicly funded biotechnology effort in agriculture” that can serve as a countervailing power to Monsanto, and pointed to China's publicly funded programme in GM, which he says is far ahead of India's. 1 The moratorium is thus in part intended to give India time to catch up with the TNCs and its neighbour, and the long-term path still points to GMOs. This was not what the local protests against Bt brinjal across India were about. They were against GM crops per se, not simply Monsanto's version. For the protesters, a strong national biotech programme is not going to shield Indian farmers from corporate profiteering and the other pitfalls of GMOs, as China's example shows.
China's biotech effort goes back to its National High Technology Research and Development Program (“863 Program”), launched in 1986, in which it shifted the orientation of the country's public agricultural research towards the commercialisation and patenting of research results in biotechnology. Through this programme, the Biotechnology Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), developed an insect-resistant Bt gene in the early 1990s, which it inserted into cotton. The rights to the Bt gene were then licensed exclusively to a spin-off company called Biocentury Transgene, which is controlled by the Shanghai Oriental Pearl Group, one of China's largest media and real-estate conglomerates, and Origin Agritech, a Chinese seed and pesticide company, registered in the British Virgin Islands, and whose stock is traded on the NASDAQ. Origin Agritech recently acquired the exclusive licence for a glyphosate-resistant gene developed by CAAS for use in soya beans, maize, cotton, rice and canola, which will compete with Monsanto's Roundup Ready crops.

The big difference between Biocentury Transgene's Bt cotton and Monsanto's Bt cotton, which was commercialised in China in 1997, is the price. With its cheaper seeds, Biocentury Transgene has taken control of 80 per cent of China's Bt cotton seed market, and it is expanding overseas into Vietnam, India, Pakistan and the Philippines. Yet in its dealings with farmers, Biocentury Transgene has been as ruthless as any multinational. According to the company, its “reputation in the seed industry has been built around … its technology licensing and tech fee collection mechanisms, as well as its pioneering actions to enforce intellectual property infringements of its technologies in China.” Its products are no different from those of the foreign multinationals either, as its Bt cotton seeds are causing the same problems for farmers in China as Monsanto's Bt cotton seeds have caused for farmers in India. Researchers have found that the widespread planting of Bt cotton in China is producing dramatic secondary pest outbreaks, increasing the use of pesticides, and saddling farmers with higher costs. Indeed, because of the problems with secondary pests brought about by the switch to Bt cotton, Bt cotton farmers in China were spending, by 2004, as much on pesticides as non-Bt farmers, and at least twice to three times as much on seeds.

Now the focus in China is on GM rice. At the end of 2009, the Chinese Biosafety Committee of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture announced its approval of GM Bt rice for commercial cultivation. The main variety under consideration was a Bt rice developed by Huazhong Agricultural University (HAU), which has been developing GM rice under the 863 program since 1998. HAU still needs two more certificates from the Chinese authorities before it can bring its rice to market – and there's also the actual process of commercialisation to sort out. The University is more than likely to partner a private company for this last step, and this company will probably be Monsanto. In October 2009, HAU and Monsanto signed a major partnership for the commercialisation of GM crops.

“Monsanto's proven ability to commercialise and market new technology could enable our research to advance from laboratory concepts to products in the world market at a much accelerated pace”, said Professor Qifa Zhang, the scientist at HAU leading the development of its Bt rice.

Partnering to push GM in India

The line between public and private, national and transnational, is just as loose in India. In early May 2010, for instance, seed multinationals, domestic seed companies and the government's National Seeds Corporation joined forces to battle against the Andhra Pradesh State Government's attempt to put a cap on royalties that companies can charge on GM seed as “technology transfer” fees from farmers. All of these players are promoting and selling Bt cotton seeds, and raking in profits even as farmers struggle with a hand-to-mouth existence.

As for Bt brinjal, it has always been a shining example of the public–private partnership model and North–South cooperation advocated by the promoters of GMOs. The project was designed by the US government through a programme funded by USAID and led by Cornell University, called ABSP II. The partners involved include Monsanto's Indian avatar, MAHYCO, 5 which has licensed Monsanto's patented Bt genes to the project, India's Tamil Nadu Agriculture University (TNAU), the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in Dharwad, and the Indian Institute of Vegetable Research in Varanasi. The project also extends to Bangladesh, where the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute and the University of the Philippines–Los Baños have already been conducting field trials of Bt brinjal under memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with MAHYCO.

The public–private partnership still leaves the likes of Monsanto very much in control. As can be seen from the Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) between TNAU and MAHYCO of March 2005, the public partners supply the local germplasm, to be freely used, while MAHYCO/Monsanto supplies its transgenes, loaded with patents. When MAHYCO in its laboratory crosses its proprietary insect-tolerant Bt eggplant lines into the local farmers' varieties supplied by TNAU, the resultant progeny becomes the “product” of the company. TNAU gets some limited rights of breeding to adapt the new GM “product” for planting by local farmers, but the agricultural university is barred from using Monsanto's “product” as parental material for the production of commercial hybrids. In effect, through the Bt brinjal project, the private sector gets to tap into the privileged access that the public research institutes have to farmers' varieties, from which it can develop its own GM products; the universities may get either funds or training to pursue fancy biotech research; and the farmers, who were never asked about the research, get to watch from the sidelines as their local varieties are genetically modified, locked up with patents and turned over to a transnational seed company.

What is more, the ABSP II project has always been as much about changing public policies as about developing technology. Tightly linked to this project is the USAID-funded South Asia Biosafety Program (SABP), which is assisting the governments of Bangladesh and India to “streamline” their governance of biotechnology. The Parliament of India is due to consider two proposed pieces of legislation concerning GM that have emerged from the Program: first, a Seed Bill law to allow for the registration and marketing of GM seeds, and a second to set up a three-member biotechnology regulatory authority that can more quickly rubber-stamp GMO approvals. In Bangladesh, the Program hastened the development of a National Institute of Biotechnology Bill, which was tabled before Parliament in February 2010. If adopted these laws will open the door to the approval of many more GM crops.

So too will the changes to the culture of public research that the Bt brinjal project and other international GM cooperation programmes have deliberately fostered. They have facilitated a shift in public research towards partnerships with corporations and the patenting of research results. India, for instance, is developing legislation that would encourage public-sector scientists to apply for intellectual property rights on crop varieties developed through their public research programmes, based on a US model that has been heavily promoted in the country through the ABSP II project and other US-backed activities.

Asia's public agricultural research institutions are metamorphosing into private companies, and their central mandate, to serve their country's farmers, is fast becoming little more than an abstraction.

“Public” versus people's

The participation of public programmes in the push for GM crops is re-igniting a discussion on public research in Asia and bringing forward some fundamental questions. Whose interests are served when public research institutes devote their limited resources to GM crops? Who owns the varieties collected by and held in state agricultural universities and national gene banks? People had assumed that farmers' varieties in the national system would be safe from private companies. Yet, in the case of Bt brinjal, national agricultural universities supply a seed company in bed with Monsanto with local eggplant germplasm, and then, by virtue of an MTA and the insertion of Monsanto's patented Bt gene, that material becomes the company's property! The agriculture university is a mere conduit for Monsanto and other seed giants to take control of farmers' varieties, passing them to companies that have a vested interest in converting the original source of seeds – the farmers – into end-users and continual consumers of their GM products. Small wonder that an organic farmer in the Philippines, at a public forum organised against Bt talong (eggplant) on Earth Day 2010 in Makati City, pertinently asked, “Why aren't our own scientists on our side?”

People's pressure has so far kept GM food crops largely out of farmers' fields in Asia. But people haven't been able to stop GM crops from invading the fields and laboratories of the continent's public research institutions. These public spaces have thus become entry points for a corporate agenda that seeks to destroy the many local varieties that small farmers and their farming cultures have kept alive, which provide the basis for a future food system that can look after people's livelihoods and food needs. It is time to replant these fields, which belong to the people, with the diversity of local varieties that farmers have developed (at times with contributions from public scientists), and to move towards a public–grassroots partnership for research that supports non-GM farming options.

For more information or to show your support, go to the Grain Website.

Photo and article courtesy of GRAIN, a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. Their support takes the form of independent research and analysis, networking at local, regional and international levels, and fostering new forms of cooperation and alliance-building. Most of their work is oriented towards, and carried out in, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Land grabbing in Latin America

GRAIN — 2010-04-01T23:10:52Z

Right now communities in Latin America, as around the world, are suffering a new kind of invasion of their territories.

These invaders are not the descendants of the European conquistadores, who appropriated land, gathered slaves and plundered their colonial domains. Nor are they the big finqueros (estate owners) of the 19th and 20th centuries, who expanded their properties by carving up the territories of indigenous peoples and creating vast plantations for the production and export of commodities such as sugar cane, coffee, cacao, banana, henequen, gum, rubber and hardwoods, and who relied on what has been called “indebted servitude”, forced labour under slave-like conditions. The new landowners are not those who brought industrial agriculture into Latin America either, who exploited local people's ancestral knowledge in order to adapt their methods to the new environment and climate.

It may be said of all these notorious characters, rooted to “their” lands and mansions, that they were physically present and politically powerful within the region. They fought continually among themselves to consolidate their fiefdoms (leaving a huge toll of dead soldiers). They made enemies and forged alliances to expand their control over water, labour, commerce, elections, public policies and access to land – regardless of the rights and the lives of others. Yet these overlords lived on or frequently visited their properties, and so came face-to-face with the resistance and rebellions of the people who had been invaded and dispossessed. No one feels nostalgia for them, but communities fighting them could do something directly, know who to struggle with, where to do it and when.

The history of Latin America is one of agrarian conflicts, and of indigenous peoples struggling to defend their ancestral territories. A new chapter of this history is opening. Another wave of land grabbing is hitting the Americas, and this time it operates from a distance and wears a halo of “neutrality”. Today's land grabbers (as thoroughly explained in governmental web brochures) say that they are merely responding to food insecurity and a world crisis “that forces us to grow food wherever we can, even if we outsource production, because we will bring home this food for the benefit of our citizens”. But when we dig a little, the financial monster shows its tail. The land grabbers are in fact big corporations and joint ventures investing enormous amounts of money in land, food production, the export and import of commodities, and food-market speculation.

Millions of hectares of farmland in Latin America have been taken over by these foreign investors over the past few years for the production of food crops and agrofuels for export. Much of the money comes from US and European pension funds, banks, private equity groups, and wealthy individuals like George Soros, and it is being channelled through special farmland investment vehicles set up by both foreign and local companies. Brazil's largest sugar company, COSAN, has a specialised farmland investment fund called Radar Propriedades, which buys Brazilian farmland on behalf of clients such as the Teachers' Insurance and Annuity Association–College Retirement Equities Fund of the US. Louis Dreyfus, one of the world's largest grain-trading multinationals, has a similar fund into which American International Group (AIG) has invested US$65 million. While media attention has focused on land deals in Africa, at least as much money and more projects are in operation in Latin America, where investors claim that their farmland investments are more secure and less controversial – ignoring the struggles over access to land being waged in practically every country on the continent. More and more investors and governments from Asia and the Gulf are training their sights on Latin America as a safe place in which to outsource food production.

Most governments in Latin America embrace these developments, with diplomatic missions frequently being sent abroad to sell the advantages of investing in their countries' farmland. The Brazilian Minister of Development, Miguel Jorge, recently told reporters: “Some Saudi princes with whom we met last year […] told President Lula that they do not want to invest in agriculture in Brazil in order to sell here in Brazil, they want food supply sources. They need food. So it would be much more effective to have them invest in agriculture in Brazil in order for us to be direct suppliers to those countries.” [1] But Brazil is not only a target of the new land grabbers, it is also a source. Brazilian investors, backed by their government, are buying land to produce food and biofuels in a growing number of other countries in Latin America and Africa. In neighbouring Guyana, for instance, the Brazilian government is financing the construction of roads, bridges and other infrastructure to open up Guyana's ecologically sensitive Rupununi savannah to large-scale agricultural projects that will export crops to Brazil. Some Brazilian rice producers who are now negotiating with the Government of Guyana for 99-year leases to large areas of indigenous lands in the Rupununi savannah were recently forced by the Brazilian Supreme Court to abandon lands that they had taken illegally from indigenous communities on their own side of the border, in Raposa Serra do Sol. [2] The multinational seed company RiceTec has approached the government of Guyana for about 2,000 ha of land in the same region – a diverse and fragile ecosystem that is home to several indigenous peoples. With this new way of doing business, the former landlords and invaders get new opportunities to grab land, with fewer economic and political risks, and a new, “respectable” title of “foreign investors”.

Evading responsibility

Much is at stake in this new wave of large-scale land grabs. They entail a huge loss of national sovereignty. Any country that sells or leases vast expanses of arable land through long-term contracts to another country or foreign corporation is jeopardising its own national sovereignty. Such deals hasten the more general dismantling of the State – in which more and more functions are cut, privatised and transformed to suit the interests of big business – and the larger territorial dispossession of peoples and communities. As a result, labour is dislocated and migration intensifies. Food production too is dislocated, since, under these deals, governments or private investors take over land to produce food for export to people elsewhere. Investors arrive with their seeds and tractors, and even labour, to extract nutrients from the soils and water of the “host country” and ship them back to their home countries or to global markets in food commodities. The host countries cannot be considered “exporters” in the traditional sense, since no country, no local people are really involved in the projects – just land that corporations exploit for their own profit, without restriction.

Yet the lands targeted are never empty, idle or not needed by local people without access to sufficient land. The first question that must be asked is, therefore: who are the real owners or custodians of the land that is being grabbed and controlled from afar? How is it that our governments can put such huge expanses of land at the disposal of foreign governments or corporations? Are they privately owned? Or are governments simply expropriating them for ad hoc commercial arrangements? It is said that the lands are only being leased, not sold, but what is the difference – in terms of the devastation – between being sold outright and leased for 50 or 99 years? The lessees will eventually hand back not only the land, depleted and ruined, but also the cost of recovering its fertility. These land grabs all drive forward the expansion of a destructive model of industrial agriculture.

The new wave of land invasions also complicates people's defence of their territories. The invader is more difficult to identify. The legal mechanisms that communities can utilise to defend against dispossession, devastation or pollution are not clear. Even where the investors can be identifiable, they are shielded from the affected communities by distance and by complex legal structures. Any “battle” against them is set in a time and space that is not defined at all by the communities or organisations.

The State, instead of protecting its people, protects the investments of foreign companies and governments by criminalising and repressing the communities who defend their territories. Borders thus lose meaning. The structures of the host State serve the interests of their new foreign “bosses”, not in the manner of the old colonial system of tribute, but through the new neoliberal commercial system, where laws and regulations are dictated by free trade agreements and investment treaties instead of national constitutions or even international law.

But the most profound long-term consequence of this new wave of land grabbing is the expansion of corporate control over food production. Over the last fifty years, corporations have constructed the framework that facilitates today's land grab, and now they are moving in to reap the harvest. Land grabbing is not simply the latest opportunity to make speculative investments for quick, massive profits; it is part of a longer process in which agrochemical–pharma–food–transport corporations are taking control of agriculture.

This is why self-governing communities prepared to defend their territories and their systems for managing communal land are a real threat to these schemes. Every organisation that stresses the importance of food sovereignty, from the community level up, will understand that this becomes an impossible feat in countries or regimes that allow and encourage land grabbing. Indigenous communities in Latin America know that without control of their own land they lose control of food production, and their farming simply becomes a new form of sharecropping. Thus more and more communities and organisations insist upon full control over their land, to grow their own crops, using and freely exchanging their native seeds and local knowledge. They insist on complete control of their water, forests, soils, settlements and pathways. And they insist on self-government, making decisions in assemblies.

The new land grabbers, on the other hand, want to enclose more of the commons. They want to dismantle our relationships and connections. They no longer need to invade: they can make commercial deals. They no longer have to carry the burden of maintaining slaves; they can rely on a ready supply of low-wage labour. They are no longer responsible for crushing the rebellious; the host governments will deal with those issues. If they do not, appropriate international companies will provide the service through informal gunmen. Neoliberalism is the invention of scheme upon scheme to avoid responsibility. To reverse the tide, we need to base our future upon taking responsibility.

Going further
• The website that monitors land grabbing worldwide is http://farmlandgrab.org 
• The new farm owners, Against the Grain, October 2009. http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=55 
• Seized! The 2008 land grab for food and financial security, GRAIN Briefing, October 2008. http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212

[1] Alexandre Rocha, “Brazilian Minister: Arabs are great opportunity”, ANBA, 8 February 2010: http://farmlandgrab.org/11020

[2] “Expelled Brazil rice farmer looking to shift operations to Guyana”, Stabroek News, 14 May 2009: http://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/stories/05/14/expelled-brazil-rice-farmer-looking-to-shift-operations-to-guyana/

Courtesy of GRAIN, a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. Our support takes the form of independent research and analysis, networking at local, regional and international levels, and fostering new forms of cooperation and alliance-building. Most of our work is oriented towards, and carried out in, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=61

Photo: flickr/ articotropical