- Juliet McFarlane is one of the main founding members of the Network of Concerned Farmers (pictured on the top left of our website). The following is an article printed in the Bulletin, although it is a bit wrong in places (ie. Juliet does not "head" our organisation but is one of the key members), it is an excellent article.

The Bulletin (full article here)

Juliet McFarlane's tireless crusade against genetically engineered crops has delivered her the scalp of agribusiness giant Monsanto, writes Anthony Hoy.

She is an unlikely battlefieldcommander, this diminutive, chain-smoking cocky's wife. Four times a day, Juliet McFarlane is forced from her home office command post – where she has co-ordinated a nationwide insurgency against one of the agricultural world's largest invading forces – to administer milk formula and penicillin to a large flock of lambs, deserted by their mothers because of the drought.

They breed them tough on the windswept south-west slopes of NSW, deep in the heartland of Australia's wheat belt. And McFarlane may be among the toughest. Last month, a fighting force founded by McFarlane forced US food biotechnology giant Monsanto to beat an uncharacteristic retreat: it has announced it is pulling the plug on its research programs into genetically modified canola and wheat crops in Australia.

The announcement was the culmination of a long-running campaign engineered by McFarlane to combat Monsanto's aims of replacing conventional farming with genetically modified cropping. While the multinational will almost certainly return to these shores, McFarlane's victory is seen as a significant achievement in the passionate debate over the safety and economics of GM food.

Concerned over what she saw as an almost unchallenged bid by Monsanto to win the hearts, minds and hip pockets of local farmers, food consumers and Australia's seed and grain export markets, McFarlane brought together a wide variety of farmers to form the National Network of Concerned Farmers. Using email, faxes and plenty of long-distance telephone calls, she co-ordinated an almost unprecedented advertising and lobbying campaign against Monsanto's plans to introduce new strains of GM crops.

Monsanto, with its deep pockets and powerful political connections, came up against an opponent armed with something just as potent – a sense of history and the strength of her convictions. Juliet McFarlane's father, Joe Gullett, was a federal MP and government whip under Sir Robert Menzies in the early 1950s. "I have a keener sense of Australia's political and farming history than most," she says.

She was raised on the famous property Lambrigg, on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River south-west of Queanbeyan. It was here, years earlier, that the Australian wheat pioneer William Farrer worked and died, where his plant-breeding programs delivered a fledgling nation its own cultivars of disease-free and drought-tolerant wheat, and the foundation of an Australian wheat industry previously ravaged by pestilence and drought.

As a child, Juliet McFarlane often visited Farrer's grave on a hill north-west of her family's Lambrigg homestead, a site that in 1938 was declared a national memorial by the federal government as a tribute to Farrer's work.

"This strong family association with Farrer, via Lambrigg, instilled in me an appreciation of his integrity and resolve that Australia's cropping sector should be free of undue political and foreign corporate influence," McFarlane says. "I feel that William Farrer is with me in spirit in the GM crops campaign, for exactly those reasons."

With husband Donald, McFarlane grows wool, breeds fat lambs and crops the 800ha Stump Jump property near Young (it was on Stump Jump, in the 1880s, that one of Australia's enduring agricultural innovations, the Sun Twin Disc Stump Jump Cultivator – the answer to problem rocks and tree stumps – was first tested and demonstrated).

Among its many products, Monsanto, which has its headquarters in St Louis, Missouri, manufactures and sells glyphosate herbicides under the trademark Roundup. Australian farmers – including for the past 20 years the McFarlanes – have sprayed it on their fields to eliminate weeds before planting.

In recent years, Monsanto has been granted global patents for a GM technology in which a glyphosate resistance gene is introduced into plant cells including canola and wheat. The result is plants that are resistant – and often immune – to glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup. Farmers can use the herbicide to kill weeds without hurting the crop itself – as long as it has been sown with Monsanto's seed – a development that has raised concerns among environmentalists and many local farmers.

Welcome to New Age farming, the era of stringent plant biotechnology patents designed to impose fundamental change on age-old farming practices. No longer can farmers simply save seed from last year's crop to use this year, or borrow from neighbours. In buying Monsanto's seed, a farmer must sign a contract promising to buy fresh seed each year and allow Monsanto to inspect their fields.

In Canada, farmers whose properties are sown with wind-blown seed or accidental spillage of Roundup Ready seed risk Monsanto instituting legal proceedings for patent infringement. It has also been seeking restitution from farmers it suspects of saving or borrowing seed.

Monsanto's designs on Australian mainstream agriculture extend to cotton, canola, wheat, soybeans and corn. But its huge R&D budget is also being directed at other "value enhancements to crops" that will inevitably, say McFarlane and other critics, impact on Australian farmers. The company's code of business conduct allows it to become involved in political activities, including making "corporate campaign contributions to state or local political parties, political committees or candidates for elective public office".

According to the US Dairy Education Board, Monsanto's code has been vigorously applied, with the House Agriculture Committee chairman Larry Combest, Attorney-General John Ashcroft, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson all named as beneficiaries of Monsanto's largesse.

Monsanto's lawyer, Clarence Thomas, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court and his vote was crucial to George W. Bush's legal challenges in the 2000 presidential election.

It is difficult to ascertain from the Australian Electoral Commission's Annual Disclosure Returns to what extent Monsanto has kicked the can for Australia's mainstream political parties and politicians. The company does have friends in high places: federal Agriculture Minister Warren Truss, among others, laments Monsanto's departure, declaring Australia's farmers risked being left behind in world markets.

And given the progressive decline in government science funding, with government R&D agencies being forced to either chase the corporate dollar or downsize, Monsanto has been actively courting government research.

"Monsanto certainly established an influential position in terms of federal legislation and policy," says Juliet McFarlane. "They have effectively lobbied for a GM cropping outcome that is much more favourable to them than to farmers, our global customers and food consumers."

In this government-funding vacuum, it is hardly surprising cash-strapped local research and plant-breeding ranks are full of Monsanto supporters. "Obviously plant breeding is not cheap," says Dr Phil Salisbury, of the Victorian Department of Primary Industries. "Monsanto is funding our work. I really believe this technology has a lot to offer Australia, and the world, in terms of feeding people. I believe, in the long term, Monsanto and others will succeed here and have a major impact."

Over Juliet McFarlane's dead body.

Monsanto was on the verge of marketing Salisbury's GM canola cultivars until McFarlane and her lobbying group effectively derailed plans for co-existence trials over some 5000ha in NSW and Victoria. In these two key states, she led an effective advertising campaign, encouraging farmers and others to lodge expressions of concern and opposition with government ministers.

Not only has McFarlane been drawing Monsanto's fire. She has been waging war with a formidable coalition of local beneficiaries of Monsanto funding. As a lone dissenting voice on the NSW Agricultural Advisory Council on Gene Technology, she has withstood concerted hostility from other members nominated by NSW Agriculture, AWB Ltd, GrainCorp, Avcare, the Grains Research and Development Corporation, CSIRO and NSW Farmers Association. The council's deliberations are "commercial-in-confidence ... It is about protecting Monsanto's interests, rather than farmers and consumers," McFarlane says.

"I realised seven years ago that farmers were in trouble, that we were being purposefully excluded from consultations about genetic engineering cropping technology.

"And subsequent legislation has only dealt with human health safety (although we have yet to see independent assessment and inter-generational long-term studies) and environmental factors – agronomics and markets have been totally ignored."

Monsanto Australia's communications manager Mark Buckingham told The Bulletin that bans on GM crops had created commercial uncertainty and made further investment unjustified. While not wanting to comment specifically on McFarlane's campaign – other than the bans on GM crops were "very disappointing" – Monsanto would only return its canola and wheat operations to Australia "if and when commercial opportunities again become attractive".

McFarlane's blunt warning is that local farmers will not allow GM crops to be grown unless and until they are proven to be agronomically viable. "To this day, we are dependent on agronomic data supplied by Monsanto and others," she says. "The federal government – any of its agencies – has done absolutely no market research. There are no precautionary principles in place. We still know very little about appropriate buffer zones, the risks of contamination of other crops, and problems with segregation of GM seed in our grain-handling systems."

Farmers, McFarlane says, will continue to demand that Monsanto and others supply agronomic data confirming their product's comparative performance against conventional crops in terms of yield, herbicide regimes, seed costs and other technical issues. "At this stage it is all guesswork," she says. "There is nothing concrete. They are trying to force farmers to accept something that they know nothing about in terms of performance and long-term sustainability."

ahoy@acp.com.au