Corporate Biotech Revives Green Revolution Horrors Anew for Third World Farmers

Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP)  - 5jul99

CORPORATE interests have hailed biotechnology as necessary if the world's food supply is to keep up with human population growth. However, Filipino farmers say that the truth is quite the opposite.

  In August last year, the militant peasant movement Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) bared the first inroads of "biopiracy" in the country's agriculture.

  Inking a deal with Marcos crony Danding Cojuanco who has earlier applied a lease to more than 3,000 hectares of public land in Negros, the fashion firm Yves Saint Laurent wanted to plant the land to ylang-ylang for which is applied a patent. YSL can sue other firms and citizens who use the plant for their own aims.

  Similarly, thanks to the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights under the World Trade Organization (TRIPs-WTO), monopolies like the Texas-based RiceTec can claim patented use of jasmine and basmati rice, which have been developed over 1,000 years by Indian and Thai farmers.

  At the other side of the biotech coin, conglomerates have developed shared interests in food, clothing, pharmaceuticals and farm chemicals and used the same stolen gene materials to breed mutant life forms for superprofits. The announcement last month of field tests for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the Philippines has signaled a new battle for local peasants against an old enemy.

  KMP chair Rafael Mariano bared that food and chemical giant Monsanto announced last month the commercialization of the mutant corn laced with genes of Bacillus thuringiensis touted to kill the pest Asiatic worm borer or Bt-corn.

  "Monsanto and genetic engineering will repeat with corn what International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Green Revolution did to rice farming across forty years, and it is bound to intensify landlessness, hunger and poverty instead of solving problems" Mariano said.

  The peasant leader explained that the dark side of biotechnology started to curse Asian agriculture when the under the guise of feeding the world, the Green Revolution started to make peasants become dependent on fertilizer, high-yielding seeds, pesticides, credit and marketing schemes supplied by multinational corporations.

  Meanwhile, merely four varieties of so called high-yielding varieties (HYVs) caused some 80,000 strains of farmer-raised breeds to disappear in 50% of Asian farm area planted to rice, a situation which allowed epidemics of brown planthopper to spread, survive pesticides and wipe out crops.

  Biotechnology's humble origins of usual breeding methods gave way to genetic engineering in the 1970s. This revolution allowed vastly unrelated species to cross-breed and produce new creatures which have combinations of desired properties of their origins. However, instead of putting out crops that would benefit poor farmers with improved yields in hostile environments, corporations invested in developing crops that would keep farmers buying new seed and chemicals.

  Just as thousands of Negros folk lose their right to till public lands claimed by the Danding Cojuanco-YSL joint venture, 50 million landless peasants find their choice to plant traditional food instead of GMOs or patented non-GMOs getting more difficult. Under the agrarian reform programs of Marcos, rice farmers were forced to comply with orders to plant Masagana 99 varieties for promises of land transfer.

  Under the Estrada administration's landmark Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act, tenants have no choice but sign planting contracts with their landlords in "corporative farming schemes" for export crop production.

  Mariano warned farmers about the entry of Monsanto and other biotech firms into local agriculture since these have sued and convicted farmers in their home countries when they tried to save seed for replanting.

  A more radical approach to make farmers totally dependent on constant purchase was patented last March in the US and dubbed "Terminator Technology." Developed by Delta Land & Pine with the help of the US Department of Agriculture, it involves a gene that simply prevents harvested seeds from germinating if the farmer attempts to save them for the next season.

  Backed by the TRIPS-WTO treaty and soon an agreement to be forged by the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO, corporate seed growers can patent existing seeds and legally prevent Third World peasants from exercising their 12,000-year old right to breed and replant these seeds.

  If the WTO meeting in Seattle this year succeeds in railroading the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), even corporations can sue sovereign governments for damages in case individual countries protect their farmers from foreign competition or from dangerous technologies.

  But do we really need the new seeds that biotech firms are bringing in this year, Mariano asks?

  Monsanto and Pioneer developed their mutant yellow corn intended for feeding meat animals that feeds the fast food industries, and not for direct consumption by the 15% of Filipinos who eat white corn. The infestation of corn borers are not demonstrably serious since there is a glut of corn in the South and peasants have been able to manage the pests.

  India, Thailand, Brazil and the United Kingdom have been the sites of angry farmer protests and legal action against GM soya, cotton and corn. After news of monarch butterflies dying from eating pollen from Bt-corn, environmental activists have pressured the European Union into a moratorium of planting of GMOs and production of genetically-altered foods (GAFs).

  Farmers' groups in these countries launched huge protests that involved uprooting and burning of transgenic cotton and soya, and offices of Cargill and Monsanto have even been vandalized in India. Widespread consumer boycotts have forced food giants and supermarkets to pull out GMOs and GAFs.

  Without genetic engineering, billions will starve, Monsanto says. However, neither Monsanto nor any of the other biotech companies appears to be engineering crops that might solve global food shortages. In a shrewd business maneuver, investors breed varieties tolerant to bombardment of herbicides they also manufacture.

  At the heart of the debate is the inevitable crisis of global monopoly capital, as overproduction pressures in rich countries continue to remake agriculture into corporate factory assembly lines.

  Stiff competition between industrialized countries for local and global markets push all agribusiness firms to invest heavily in technologies that save on labor and land, make food quality highly uniform and cut waste disposal expenses.

  Those who insist on less artificial growing methods incur higher expenses, go bankrupt and sell off their businesses to survivors. In a rich country such as France, 43,000 farms disappear and 86,000 people are forced to seek jobs in the cities each year.

  The monopolies that remain integrate their operations that not create mountains of grains, fruit, dairy products and fibers. Exporters dump these surpluses on poor countries by force of trade liberalization agreements such as the WTO.

  Peasant activists like Mariano insist that the issues of hunger are not being addressed by biotechnology. "The problem is the unjust distribution of land and food. We have already achieved high production to feed the world's population five times over, but 800 million people do not have access to that food everyday."

  Meanwhile, monopolies continue to confine millions of animals in vast feedlots and poultry batteries that churn out horrendous piles of manure and pesticide residues, leading to polluted water and lands. Epidemics inevitably broke out among British cows, Hong Kong poultry and Malaysian hogs with scary regularity. Many of these animals have had already undergone genetic manipulation.

  In this explosive situation, genetic engineering presents even more precarious risks for mankind, as scientists rediscover the risks of tampering with nature.

Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) is a nationwide federation of Philippine organizations of landless peasants, small farmers, farm workers, subsistence fisherfolk, peasant women and rural youth. It has effective leadership over a total of 800,000 rural people comprising roughly 9% of the Philippine agricultural labor force. It has 55 provincial and 6 regional chapters nationwide.

KMP carries out painstaking organizing and education work among the peasantry as an important requisite to building a strong and mass-based organization. It employs various forms of struggle ranging from simple court actions and lobby work to mass mobilizations such as nationwide strikes and protest actions. 
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