Asheville, North Carolina -- In the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty following Tuesday's attacks, organizers called off a "Rally for Real Food," scheduled to coincide with a biotechnology retreat at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Asheville. Environmental and other groups around the US have kept a similarly low profile. But some local activists knew nothing of the cancellation, and about two dozen of them showed up anyway.
Scott Del Duca was among the police officers waiting at the hotel for them. "We're going to have about 35 officers here, and anyone associated with the protest who sets foot on this property will be arrested," said Del Duca, who acknowledged that Tuesday's events had played a role in the Asheville Police Department(APD)'s larger-than-usual mobilization.
As patrol cars circled past them, members of the impromptu rally knelt in the grass at the Westgate Plaza Shopping Center to make signs. Eventually APD Captain Ted Lambert approached the group and let them know that he had secured a lot just outside the hotel's gates, where they could demonstrate without harassment. He stressed that the police presence was as much for their protection as for the hotel's, and in fact, as they marched to the lot, the driver of a passing pickup shook a gun clip at them.
But Lambert's concern for their safety came against a backdrop of internet surveillance, FBI monitoring, and inflammatory phone calls from both the police and biotechnology advocates.
"A sergeant called me from the APD," said Sy Stanley, manager of the plaza where the activists gathered, "saying that statements had been made by individuals who intended to try to infiltrate the group and use it as a basis for some other kind of action." He couldn't remember the sergeant's name. "I told him that as far as I knew, y'all were just going to try to educate the public."
"I was told that the same group sponsoring the rally had caused $10,000 in damages to a hotel in Greensboro during a similar conference," said Connie Nuckols, the hotel's director of sales. "But I called all over Greensboro, and I couldn't find a hotel that knew of such an occurrence."
One of the groups organizing the rally, DownSouth Resistance Against Genetic Engineering (SouthRAGE), had in fact participated in an action at the Syngenta biotech facility in Greensboro in April; and the facility, which cosponsored the Asheville retreat, has used the $10,000 figure, though damages were limited to spraypaint and the planting of organic corn on Syngenta property. But the distinction between "biotechnology facility" and "hotel" was an apparently insignificant one to the caller, whose identity Nuckols doesn't remember. "I got a lot of phone calls about this," said Nuckols, "from all sorts of people: the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, the Asheville Police Department."
One biotech advocate emailed her a link to a website where she could see for herself what the group had done in previous actions. "Apparently a building had been taken over, and hostages had been taken," said Nuckols.
The taking of hostages turned out to be a lock-down before the door of a biotech industry meeting. But in the wake of Tuesday's attacks, the politically charged term "hostage" carries a whole new range of significance. And the FBI definition of terrorism - "the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian populace, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives" - is cause for alarm among direct action groups, especially environmental ones now that the term "ecoterror" is in vogue among industry apologists: the Earth Liberation Front is widely regarded as the main terrorist group in the US.
The hotel's assistant general manager, Shawn Wragg, said that the FBI had called the APD. Agent Rankin, of the Asheville FBI office, denied it: "We're crawling through our butts trying to get this New York thing figured out," he complained to a reporter. "We don't have time for this sort of thing right now. People love to say all sorts of things about the FBI. Listen, if we want to talk to you we'll come and get you. Don't worry about it."
Captain Lambert was more candid about FBI contacts. "Sure," he admitted, "they do that any time there's any kind of rally or protest where property damage was done." Of equal concern to activists is the monitoring of internet communications. SouthRAGE has been under Internet scrutiny since at least April, though the first suggestion of it came only recently, when
Bill Gorz, one of the organizers of the rally, received a phone call from a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times. "I asked the guy where he found the number," said Gorz. "He said he got it from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, who said they'd gotten it off the web; and sure enough, that information only went out via the SouthRAGE and Katuah Earth First! listserves."
Steven Burke, senior vice president of corporate affairs and external relations at the NC Biotechnology Center, forwarded the listserve message to the Citizen-Times reporter. It included the date, time, and place of SouthRAGE's planning meeting for the rally, and the meeting was duly paid a surprise visit by an Asheville police officer. "There are,"
Burke acknowledged, "a number of entities within the Research Triangle Park who routinely share information about any activities which might concern them." But this message, he said, was probably forwarded to him
by the Center's library, which subscribes to a number of database services, and he sent it to the Citizen-Times so that their reporter could hear an opposing point of view.
"I'm sure that we monitor the activities of such groups," said Rose Beci, manager of the Science and Technology division at the Center, who made a few calls to prepare Holiday Inn for the rally. "In response to these sorts of situations, there's a roundtable - I don't know the name of it - that consists of corporate members, PR people, perhaps law enforcement. We're just trying to keep ourselves informed and educated," she said. "With the [Asheville] retreat, our intention was to make sure things weren't taken too far off track. Anything on the web," she added, referring to the SouthRAGE listerve, "is public information."
Rick Hall, a genetics researcher at NC State University, had earlier attempted to take advantage of the Web's relative transparency via a disingenuous email to the group's contact person. "I am very interested in your organization," he wrote without identifying himself. "I read about your protest in Greensboro at Syngenta. Can you send me information please? Also do you have any upcoming protests planned?"
Another SouthRAGE listserve message found its way to the Food Industry Environmental Network (FIEN), an industry-friendly news service which keeps its clients up to date on a variety of topics, including biotechnology. The message, which was publicly distributed via FIEN's e-newsletter, concerned web-based research methods, and suggested "getting a grip on who is doing what, so we can confront and expose them personally." FIEN's comment advised that "government, university and company agricultural biotechnology researchers should take seriously the possibility that the anti-biotech protest movement may be planning to target individual researchers, not just their research projects and may want to review security precautions with their local police officials."
This kind of low-tech monitoring, of course, is accessible to almost anyone. But in the hysteria-tinged days following September 11, technologies such as Carnivore, the FBI's internet surveillance program, may soon have their applications broadened considerably. Congressional committees held hearings Monday and Tuesday (dates?--Eamon) to consider the Department of Justice(DOJ)'s proposed Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001. The Act would introduce a plethora of privacy rights issues - limiting, for example, judicial oversight of surveillance activities, and authorizing surreptitious police entries in all criminal investigations -- which have civil liberties groups up in arms. The DOJ's own analysis of the Act admits at one point that "United States prosecutors may use against American citizens information collected by a foreign government even if the collection would have violated the Fourth Amendment."
Compared with these machinations, the rally was a model of open communication. Five student researchers attending the retreat approached rally participants, curious about "real food" advocacy and eager to debate the issue. Among them were two Duke grad students: Alyssa Dill, who studies giberrellin (a plant hormone which regulates, for example, when a plant flowers and develops fruit), and Rebecca Mosher, whose focus is plant resistance to disease.
"Organic farming can't feed the world," Dill argued. "Even countries, such as those in Southeast Asia, with a surplus of a certain crop - for example, rice - will suffer malnutrition because rice lacks beta carotene. Biotechnology produced Golden Rice, which contains the missing nutrient."
Gorz responded with the well-known argument that an 11-year-old child would have to eat 15 pounds of Golden Rice a day to satisfy his minimum daily requirement of vitamin A, and Dill admitted the genetically engineered rice was imperfect. "And those countries didn't use to have this problem," he continued. "IMF and World Bank policies force these countries to focus on export, which means they lose plant diversity and variety, and then biotech industries take advantage of the situation."
"I agree that big industry doesn't have the highest goals and values," said Mosher. "But that's not a reason to do away with biotechnology altogether."
Perhaps not. Still, a growing chorus of voices are asking if there's a good reason to keep biotechnology alive. Kraft Food's taco shell recall last year (triggered by the discovery that the shells contained trace amounts of StarLink corn, an unapproved "Frankenfood" and potential allergen engineered by Aventis, another of the retreat's sponsors) is only one of a series of recent biotech controversies, including the finally verified lethal effect of Bt corn pollen on Monarch butterfly caterpillars, and the multiple escapes of transgenic salmon into the ocean, where they may ultimately drive wild salmon populations to extinction.
"You may feel that biotechnology should be abandoned," says Burke. "But I've already made the commitment that this technology will develop. We simply have to make sure that it develops responsibly."
Whether this is possible or not remains to be seen. In the meantime, the industry is watching its opponents more closely than ever.
Thanks for sending this article to Norfolk Genetic Information Network (ngin), http://www.ngin.org.uk 14oct01
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