| - Biotechnology Australia forum
Question asked by Geoffrey Carracher:
Should Australia have a strict liability regime in place that ensures that GM companies are fully responsible for any adverse economic and health impacts associated with their product?
1. Yes, the GM companies should be solely liable - 69% vote
2. Yes, the grower of GM crops should be solely liable - 23% vote
3. Yes, the State Government should be solely liable - 3% vote
4. Yes, the Federal Government should be solely liable - 3% vote
5. No, the non-GM farmers should be solely liable - 0%
Biotechnology 2020 - a forum on what the future might hold for us
Date Monday, 2 May 2005 Mount Gambier, SA,
A free community forum to discuss visions of biotechnology in the year 2020. What impact will biotechnological innovations have upon our society in the year 2020? Will we see many of our health, environmental and agricultural problems being solved, or will we see new and unforseen problems confronting us?
Panellists and themes:
1. Can biotechnology aid a salty landscape? - Dr Sean Miller, Senior Research Scientist with the South Australian Research and Development Institute's Southeast Pastures Group
2. Liability issues relating to GM food crops - Geoffrey Carracher, Network of Concerned Farmers.
3. Ethical issues in reproductive biotechnology leading up to 2020. - Professor Graham Jenkin, Professor of Physiology, Monash University, Associate Director Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories, Chief Education Officer, Australian Stem Cell Centre.
4. The future in a glass - Dr Paul Chambers, Research Team Leader and Principal Molecular Biologist, The Australian Wine Research Institute.
CHAIR: Alan Richardson, ABC Radio, South East
INTRO (and technology voting talk through) - Craig Cormick, Biotechnology Australia.
Geoffrey Carracher speech:
Alternative GM vision for the year 2020
Introduction
You have heard from pro-GM activists about all of the benefits of GM crops. Many of these activists are associated with GM industries, such as scientists who get funding from GM industries or work in collaboration with them. Others are bureaucrats who are employed to carry-out government policies. We would like to provide you with an alternative view, brought together by farmers, doctors and scientists who will have to deal with the consequences of GM crops if they continue to be planted. While this view is bleak, it is based on sound knowledge and is at least as plausible as the rosy future presented by pro-GM activists.
The year 2020 in Australia
The south east of South Australia (SA) has now been declared to be GM-contaminated. This is partly because the South Australian government, although it was supposed to be enforcing its own legislation to prevent commercial plantings of GM crops, has permitted so many canola ‘trial’ sites for seed-bulking for export that contamination of nearby farms has occurred. The situation has been made far worse however, because one or two farmers, convinced by the marketing campaigns of the GM industry, have decided to directly import GM seed, to plant it illegally and not tell anyone. Immediately after this contamination is discovered, neighbouring areas in the adjoining state of Victoria are also tested and found to be contaminated. The direct consequences to businesses in the contaminated areas are:
- By 2020, after decades of deregulation and National Competition Policy, the local dairy industry consists of just a few, large-scale producers surviving on razor-thin margins. Because of the GM contamination, those remaining that are still able to sell their milk must do so at a heavy discount, thereby making a loss. They are forced to abandon their farms, spelling the end of the local dairy industry. Local milk and cheese companies have to lay-off staff. Some go into receivership.
- Tatiara Meat has a premium market worth $300 million in 2020, based on a clean, green image. Because local livestock have been fed GM-contaminated feed, Tatiara looses its premium market. Local farmers no longer get their premium when selling to Tatiara either and their income drops sharply.
- Oats milled by Blue Lake Milling are contaminated with GM canola. The company looses it market and its organic status. Will it survive?
- The local honey industry cannot sell its honey, particularly to Europe because of contamination. To try and control the damage, bee keepers enforce their five kilometre restriction zone around GM contaminated areas. Crop yields in the zone plummet due to reduced pollination, and planting crops such as canola or lucerne for seed become pointless.
- All products leaving the area, particularly of grain, must be tested to show that they are GM-free. The cheap ‘strip test’ is deemed to be too inaccurate for this purpose, so farmers need to pay for a DNA test at approximately $600 each. Those not willing to pay have to sell their produce as ‘GM’ on the international market. At this point, affected farmers remember the comments made by Federal Agriculture Minister Warren Truss in April 2005, when he urged farmers to plant GM crops to deliver cheaper products to consumers. It has become apparent that the products are cheaper because no-one wants to buy them. Many farmers go broke.
A quarantine area is declared to try and prevent contamination elsewhere, by preventing contaminated feed or seed leaving the affected areas. But it is too late. Not only are crop surveys of other areas revealing GM contamination, particularly in New South Wales and Western Australia, but the first ship-loads of Australian wheat and barley are rejected at their destination ports due to GM contamination. The Australian government tries frantically to find a port that will accept them. It finally does so, but at rock-bottom prices. The non-GM wheat and barley farmers are expected to just accept the loss.
The result is a legal free-for-all. All the affected industries and farmers want to sue someone to recover their current and future losses. They find that they cannot sue the SA government over the ‘trial sites’. They also find that they can’t sue the GM crop industry because it lured all ‘trial site’ farmers to sign contracts giving the ‘trial site’ farmer liability for any contamination. These farmers are quickly sued, but go bankrupt, preventing others from recovering any losses. An attempt is made to sue the large agrichemical companies that own the patents on these crops, but it is quickly determined that they have only tiny assets in Australia and so are not worth suing. Lawyers make a fortune. No-one else does. Rumours start about who may have illegally planted GM canola. The finger is pointed at several farmers, who need police protection due to the number of death threats made against them.
Meanwhile, the so-called GM big success story in Australia, GM cotton, has ended badly. Their widespread use, coupled with their herbicide regimes, has resulted in rampant overgrowth of the soil fungus, fusarium. This has so reduced yields that crops can no longer be grown in those fields. In addition, the continuing reduced rainfall in Australia has caused a serious re-think of water allocations, resulting in a ban on the growth of water-hungry crops like cotton and rice in most areas where it was previously grown. Essentially, there is no longer an Australian cotton industry.
Furthermore, Australia’s attempts to gain financially from research and development into GM crops has also ended badly. Some politicians, scientists and organisations like the CSIRO had thought that they could join what appeared to be a gold rush and make a lot of money by developing GM plants. They also thought that they could compete against the large multinational companies that dominate the area. They have finally realised that they were fooling themselves. Australian intellectual property rights, such as patents, have all been bought by these companies. Most GM crop researchers in Australia now work directly for these companies, if they work at all.
The year 2020 internationally
GM crops have been touted by GM advocates to be the solution to the world’s starving. However, rampant infectious diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS, had halved the African population by 2020, a situation that was never going to be improved by planting GM crops. India decided to embrace GM crops to try and feed its millions. However, this required mechanised cropping systems. Within a few years, this process had displaced twenty million Indian farmers from their lands, a number equivalent to the entire population of Australia. These farmers moved to swell city slums, and being largely illiterate and unable to find work, were unable to feed themselves adequately and largely starved. Meanwhile, in 2020, about twenty years after some South American countries enthusiastically embraced herbicide resistant soy, the repeated planting of this one crop has so depleted the soil, and promoted fusarium infestations, that most agricultural land has been rendered useless, resulting in widespread famine.
The overwhelming resistance to GM foods by consumers has increased over the years. Consumer groups in the US have finally won GM food labelling laws in the US. As a result, US consumers start to realise just how much GM food they are eating and protest. American farmers start to pull-out GM crops for non-GM crops. The market for GM crops declines even further.
US consumer agitation causes investigations into the effects of eating GM foods on human health. It soon becomes apparent that the safety testing of these crops, undertaken by the GM industries themselves, and accepted by bureaucrats employed to carry-out government pro-GM policies, was woefully inadequate to determine the long-term health effects of these foods on people. The first consequence becomes apparent when antibiotic-resistant genes in some GM crops are transferred into bacteria in the guts of humans and animals. When this is combined with the over-use of antibiotics in human medicine and animal husbandry, widespread antibiotic resistance occurs. People now routinely die from infections after childbirth and even minor operations.
But this is small fry compared with the big GM food health scandals that are breaking in 2020. One occurs when it is discovered that two corns that were engineered in the 1990’s to produce pharmaceutical drugs are in the food supply. One produces a pig vaccine. The other produces an abortion drug. Another scandal occurs when it is realised that some of the novel proteins produced by GM crops are causing widespread serious allergies. In fact, the rate of allergy-associated death from anaphylaxis has doubled in the last twenty years to 2020.
But the biggest scandal occurs when previous warnings about the promoter sequences used in GM crops come true. By 2020, it had been known for decades that these sequences could ‘jump out’ of their inserted position and go elsewhere in DNA. By 2020, it has become apparent that these sequences have often jumped into people’s genes, and particularly into ‘oncogenes’ that turn a normal cell into a cancerous one. This explains the large jump in a variety of cancers in the US population over the last couple of decades to 2020. But even worse, these sequences were also found in newborn children, meaning that it is being transmitted in our genes to our children, with as yet unknown results. By genetically modifying plants, we have also genetically modified ourselves in unknown ways.
Together, these result in widespread panic. Everyone is outraged that they have been eating these crops for decades without their permission and without proper safety testing. World governments call for calm, including the President of Australia. Various countries stage a variety of investigations. Everyone is suing everyone else and it will take a generation to sort-out the mess. Like tobacco companies, GM crop companies initially deny that their products could cause any illness whatsoever. However, as the evidence mounts, and they see the amount of money that they will have to pay-out, these companies voluntarily go bankrupt, leaving the public purse to pay for all the damage. Criminal charges are laid against some company directors, scientists, bureaucrats and politicians for being aware of the warnings but not heeding them, and for doing, or accepting, shoddy science.
Consumers everywhere scramble for guaranteed non-GM foods, so farmers everywhere scramble for non-GM seeds, only to find that the GM industry has been buying-up non-GM seed companies for years to reduce competition. Consequently, there are not enough non-GM seeds to meet demand. In addition, GM genes have so contaminated apparent non-GM crops, that they cannot ever be completely recalled from the fields. Organic farmers instantly become very wealthy as they are most able to sell non-GM seed and food from farms where GM crops have not been grown. Unfortunately, Australia can’t take advantage of the situation by selling non-GM crops at an enormous premium because of the ever-widening contamination that began in the south east of South Australia. This situation can be prevented if Australian governments have the sense to impose strict liability regimes on GM crops and if we all realise that non-GM biotechnology is the way to go. After all, it promises far more than GM technology, without health or consumer rejection problems.
Authors
The people who have contributed ideas or information to this article, in alphabetical order, are: Andrea Balcombe (farmer), Dr Judy Carman PhD MPH (epidemiologist and nutritional biochemist), Geoffrey Carracher (farmer), Dr Kate Clinch-Jones BMBS (medical practitioner), Dr Phil Davies PhD (plant geneticist), Juliet McFarlane (farmer) and Julie Newman (farmer).
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