|
|
 
|
Gene-altered profit-killer; other news
(Monday, Sept. 25, 2006 CropChoice news) --
1. Don’t cry to them, Argentina: Is Monsanto playing fast and loose with Roundup Ready soybeans in Argentina? 1. Don't cry to them, Argentina By Kelly Hearn Crying not for Argentina but for lost patent fees, Monsanto's legal hacks are in European courts suing to block millions of tons of Argentine soybean meal from docking on the continent.
Monsanto says that much of the meal crossing the Atlantic to feed Europe's cows and pigs contains traces of its genetically modified Roundup Ready Soybeans. Known as RR, the soybeans are tweaked to withstand the company's Roundup herbicide. This resistance lets farmers blanket entire fields with the chemical mixture rather than surgically applying it to kill off weeds.
Monsanto holds a patent for the seed in Europe, but not in Argentina, where a dispute over technology rights keeps the U.S.-based agri-giant from collecting technology fees on RR seed sales. By using its European patent to disrupt Argentina's lucrative soy-meal trade with Europe, the company hopes to strong-arm Argentine farmers into paying up.
Meanwhile, the tricky lawyering is shedding light on what critics say is a dubious corporate strategy to make Argentina a mega-lab for GM soybeans, one that's already spawned deep environmental and economic problems far off the radar screen of the international media.
The Patent Play
Walking into the Social Forum for the Resistance Against Industrialized Agriculture in downtown Buenos Aires last month, I wasn't sure what to expect. Instead of suits and ties, I found lots of facial hair and rumpled clothes -- technology wonks, students, professors, scientists, and landless peasant farmers gathered to protest the sins of large-scale industrial agriculture. One middle-aged water-quality activist wore a papier-mâché spigot on his head. An interpretive artist twirled a rubber hose and let out angry groans. Though less legible than the speakers' PowerPoints, her message seemed thematically congruent: the soy is hitting the fan in Argentina -- and Monsanto's bad behavior is to blame.
I got a café cortado and searched out Adolfo Boy, an agronomist with the Grupo de Reflexion Rural, a technology watchdog group. "Ask yourself why Monsanto, with all its lawyers, never got a patent for gene RR in Argentina," he said, thumbing through a binder exploding with dated newspaper clips.
He rewound to the 1990s, when the firm brought its new genetically tweaked seeds to Argentina. His theory -- shared by many here -- is that Monsanto intentionally left RR seeds in the public domain so Argentine farmers would use them, spread them, create new plant varieties, and, most important, lock themselves into buying the pricey Roundup herbicide.
Argentina first approved RR seeds in 1996, and Monsanto tried to build its royalty fees into the price, but a thriving black market kept the seed prices too low for the company to recoup the fees. Meanwhile, up in the land of strong patent enforcement, U.S. farmers were paying a $6.50 patent-based technology fee every time they bought a 50-pound bag of RR seed. Around that time, seeds that sold for $9 a bag in Argentina were going for $21.50 in the United States. A report issued at the time by the U.S. government's General Accounting Office blamed the price difference on lack of property-rights enforcement in Argentina. The American Soybean Association asked Monsanto to refund more than $300 million to U.S. farmers. The company refused.
As Argentina struggled to recover from a devastating economic collapse that hit in 2001, the illegal trade in RR seeds grew. By 2005, according to one estimate, only 20 percent of Argentina's $1 billion annual soybean seed trade was legal. Monsanto had had enough. It stopped direct seed sales in 2003, though Argentine companies continued to sell seeds containing RR genes and paid some licensing fees.
Having missed out on the chance to collect fees at the point of sale, Monsanto lawyers in 2004 said the company would charge a $1-per-ton export fee on Argentine soy and soy derivatives shipped abroad (and $2.50 per ton between 2006 and 2011). Argentina's farmers and government officials refused.
Monsanto has denied that it made a strategic decision not to pursue patent rights in Argentina. It didn't respond to requests for comment for this story, but in an open letter published in an Argentine paper, El Clarin, Monsanto rebuffed the public-domain theory, claiming the company tried to get a patent but was blocked by legalities.
Evidence suggests otherwise: as farmers were getting to know its RR seeds, Monsanto did not object -- as Argentine law allows it to do -- when farmers registered some 200 plant varieties containing Monsanto's RR technology with the National Seed Institute, according to a report by the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatic. Had Monsanto been truly interested in exercising legal rights over RR seed, the theory goes, it would have made use of the law, stopping others from incorporating it in other varieties.
Monocultural a Manos
What's clearer than Monsanto's patent strategy is the astounding rate at which the RR soybean took hold, and the repercussions it has wrought.
Since RR was approved for use here in 1996, Argentine jungles and savannas have been cleared to make room for more than 34 million acres of the crop. The rate at which forests in northern Argentina are being turned into soy plantations is three to six times higher than the world average, and the country now ranks second only to the United States as the biggest producer of GM crops in the world.
As GM operations push out traditional farming here, civil and environmental groups are crying foul, making Argentina a case study for the technology's unintended economic, social, and environmental consequences. Agronomists say the herbicide-resistant soybean is leading to serious problems, including deforestation, soil degradation, pesticide pollution, and genetic contamination.
"Argentina is placing its future economy and food security in danger by choosing to ignore the ecological downside of such heavy reliance on a no-till, herbicide-based system," said Charles Benbrook, an agronomist and consultant who worked for the Carter administration and conducted a study in 2005 on GM soy's impacts in Argentina. "They are going to run into serious problems."
GM cheerleaders say the crops enhance food security, feeding the hungry masses with higher yield power. But statistics fall crossways. Walter Pengue of the University of Buenos Aires and Miguel Altieri of the University of California-Berkeley report that wheat, dairy, and fruit production has dropped significantly in Argentina as farmland has turned to soybean monoculture.
Monsanto claims RR soybeans decrease the need for repeated herbicide applications. But some weeds build resistance to herbicides, and when they do, different herbicides are needed in the mix. Pengue and Altieri report that in the Argentinean pampas, eight species of weeds exhibit resistance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. The fear: the more plants become resistant, the more farmers turn to different pesticides, further complicating the soup of poisons being spread through the country's fields.
There are also concerns that all this genetic tinkering is causing GM soy to have lower protein levels than regular varieties. A study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2004 analyzed soybeans and soybean meal from the world's top producers: Argentina, Brazil, China, India, and the U.S. Those from Argentina, which Benbrook says at the time were 98 percent Roundup Ready, had the lowest crude protein content. Those from China, which grew no GM soy at the time, had the highest. "This points directly to the possibility that RR has resulted in significant decline in protein level," Benbrook said, adding that it mirrors concerns that protein levels in soy and corn in the United States are decreasing.
Meanwhile, experts say that GM crops may be playing a role in rising social dislocation. In 1998 there were 422,000 producers or local farmers in Argentina; by 2002, that number had dropped by 25 percent to 318,000.
And there are health worries stemming from the widespread use of Roundup, which has reportedly been sprayed aerially and drifted onto non-RR crops and into communities. Dario Gianfelici, a general physician from the small town of Cerrito in a soy farming region, says he has seen medical problems in farmhands that stem from herbicide exposure. "I don't have the money or the manpower to [raise awareness] like I would like to do," he said in a telephone interview, "but I continue to talk about this."
Attention, Class
With people like Gianfelici and Boy sounding alarms, Monsanto is scrambling to bolster its public image. To create a new generation of customers friendly to the idea of consuming GM products, it has joined the likes of Bayer S.A. and Dow AgroSciences Argentina S.A. in funding ArgenBio, a trade association that offers teacher workshops and downloadable educational materials for use in Argentine schools. Gabriela Levitus, ArgenBio's director, says the group's purpose is "to divulge information about biotechnology."
One woman's information is another woman's propaganda. Said Silvie Sieb, a grade-school teacher from the province of Entre Rios who attended one of the workshops, "It's pure show business so they can turn kids into customers."
Sieb said the presenters explained how "inofensivo" the RR soybeans and Roundup herbicide are. But, she said, "They did not say that it is destroying our soil and reducing biological and productive diversity with a monoculture cultivation that serves to feed the pigs of Europe and Asia, and next the cars of Europe with soy-based biodiesel."
Meanwhile, over in Europe, a body of the European Union released a nonbinding decision in August saying it disagrees with Monsanto's claims that soy meal derived from genetically modified seeds infringes the company's patents. But Monsanto's lawyers are still beavering away, undeterred.
Kelly Hearn is a writer in South America. He is a former UPI staff reporter and a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and other publications.
2. Gene-altered profit-killer By Rick Weiss The disclosure last month that American long-grain rice has become widely contaminated with traces of an experimental, gene-altered rice has provoked an economic crisis for farmers and reignited a long-smoldering debate over the adequacy of U.S. oversight of biotech food.
Already, Japan has banned U.S. long-grain imports, noting, as have other countries, that the genetically altered variety never passed regulatory muster. Stores in Germany, Switzerland and France have pulled American rice off their shelves. And at least one ship last week remained quarantined in Rotterdam, awaiting word of whether its contents would be diverted or destroyed.
"Until this happened, it looked like rice farmers were finally going to make a profit this year," said Greg Yielding, executive director of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association. Instead, U.S. rice prices have slumped about 10 percent, and some expect market losses to reach $150 million.
Scientists are just now figuring out how LLRICE601 made its way into the nation's commercial rice supply. The company that developed it, Bayer CropScience of Research Triangle Park, N.C., says it abandoned the project in 2001.
The unapproved rice poses no threat to human or animal health, federal officials have assured the public. And the level of contamination is minuscule, on the order of just six genetically engineered grains in every 10,000.
But the growing economic fallout from LL601's unwanted and illegal reappearance -- including a handful of lawsuits against Bayer -- is a reminder that when it comes to food, public perception is as important as scientific assurances.
"We've been warning for years that something like this could happen," Yielding said, citing a December 2005 report from the Agriculture Department's inspector general that lambasted the government for not keeping a closer eye on companies developing new crops. "This is one of those deals where you hate to be right."
Genetically engineered crops are common in the United States, where 60 to 90 percent of the corn, soybean and cotton plants are enhanced with genes from bacteria and other organisms. Most of the added genes allow the plants to make their own insecticides or, as in LLRICE601, confer resistance to commonly used weedkillers.
But motivated by scientific, cultural and economic concerns, most countries around the world are finicky about biotech crops and allow relatively few in. That, in turn, has created tension for U.S. agriculture.
Although U.S. farmers say they favor, in theory, further development of the crops, many have called for delays in field testing or marketing until other countries agree to accept them. With few mechanisms in place to segregate engineered from conventional varieties, and wide availability of tests able to detect minute quantities of foreign DNA, they say it is not worth the risk that shipments will become contaminated and rejected.
"Once it's in the pipeline, it's very hard to get it out," said Jeffrey Barach, a vice president at the Food Products Association, a D.C. trade group.
Concerns have been especially high among rice growers, who sell big portions of their harvests to Kellogg for Rice Krispies, Anheuser-Busch for beer and Gerber for baby food, said Eric Wailes, an agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
"These are companies with huge brand equity," Wailes said, and are unwilling to risk their reputations.
In fact, many experts suspect that pressure from the food industry was a major reason why Bayer mysteriously dropped LL601 five years ago without seeking USDA approval for it. The company has refused to answer questions about its biotech rice program, which produced two other varieties. The Agriculture Department deemed those two safe for sale, but Bayer opted not to market them.
In recent weeks, tests by researchers in Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana have begun to unveil how LL601 persisted even after Bayer quit. The rice had been grown in several test locations, including Louisiana State University's rice research station near Crowley from 1999 to 2001.
Analyses in the past two weeks of samples of other rice varieties that were grown over the years at the same research station found that at least one -- a long-grain rice known as Cheniere -- was contaminated with LL601 at least as far back as 2003.
Records indicate that the affected plot of Cheniere rice, which was used to grow "foundation stock" from which much larger amounts were produced over the next few years, was located at least 160 feet from the LL601 plot, farther apart than what USDA required, said LSU spokeswoman Frankie Gould.
Exactly how and when the crossover of the genetically altered rice occurred remains uncertain. It could be, experts said, that some grains of LL601 got mixed inadvertently with grains of Cheniere, so that future plantings of Cheniere were really plantings of both. That could have gone unnoticed for years until someone tested for the errant gene -- which is how Riceland Foods Inc. of Stuttgart, Ark., happened upon the problem this year.
Or it may be that LL601 plants fertilized some Cheniere plants, creating a gene-enhanced Cheniere. Rice pollen does not usually go far afield, but it can.
Tests on more than a dozen other LSU varieties have come up negative for the LL601 gene, as have tests from Texas and Arkansas plots; results from Mississippi are pending. But because many varieties of rice are mixed in huge bins after harvest, it could be difficult to rid the U.S. rice crop of the illegal variety.
"The damage has been done and it is still being done," said Adam J. Levitt, a partner in the Chicago office of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLC, who led a class action lawsuit that won $110 million for farmers after gene-altered and unapproved StarLink corn appeared in food in 2000. "They've really in a very substantial way poisoned the well."
How Bayer will deal with the international ramifications of LL601's escape is uncertain. But its domestic strategy became clear on Aug. 18, the day Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced the problem. That day Bayer filed a petition seeking USDA approval -- or "deregulation" -- of LL601.
If the petition is successful, the variety's presence would no longer violate U.S. regulations -- but the strategy has raised some hackles.
"Post hoc approval strikes us as really cynical," said Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the District-based Center for Food Safety. "Bayer has no intention of bringing this rice to market. Clearly this is an effort to avoid liability."
Last week Freese's group filed a petition asking USDA to reject Bayer's request and to rescind its earlier approval of the company's other two engineered rice varieties.
The petition argues that the herbicide resistance trait is sure to make its way into red rice, a weedy wild relative of white rice that is already rice growers' biggest pest. Any advance likely to make red rice herbicide-resistant, the petition claims, would force farmers to turn to more potent weedkillers and violate the Plant Protection Act.
Even if Bayer succeeds in deregulating LL601, farmers will still face international rejection -- a potentially major hit, since most rice profits are from overseas sales.
On Friday the European Commission said the rice "is not likely to pose an imminent safety concern." But it also made plain that the rice is illegal and offered no hints it would soften its stance.
Of even greater concern is whether Central American nations -- the biggest foreign buyers of U.S. rice -- and Mexico, the second biggest, will adhere to their strict rules on engineered foods. Talks were underway late last week, Yielding said.
The December inspector general report scolded USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for failing to conduct required inspections of test plots and in some cases not even knowing where experiments it had approved were being conducted.
APHIS spokeswoman Rachel Iadicicco said the shortcomings cited in that report have been remedied.
3. Genetically modified wheat still shunned
Billings Gazette FARGO, N.D. - An eminent agricultural economist has looked at it again: The world still is against genetically modified wheat.
Robert Wisner of Iowa State University in Ames, offering an annual update of his 2003 study "Market Risks of Genetically Modified Wheat," said introducing genetically modified wheat won't turn around the trend of declining wheat acres in the United States, as some proponents suggest.
Wisner, updating the study on behalf of the Western Organization and its seven state groups - including the Dakota Resource Council - found that introducing genetically modified wheat still would risk the loss of a quarter of U.S. hard red spring and wheat durum export markets and would cut prices about one-third, as earlier reports have concluded. "Nothing new," said Todd Leake of Emerado, N.D., a commercial farmer and chairman of the DRC's Food Safety Task Force, which deals with genetically modified wheat issues.
Plans shelved
The issue was heavily in the news until 2004, when Monsanto announced it would shelve its Roundup Ready plans until markets and farmers would accept it. Syngenta and others are continuing to develop genetically modified wheat that would protect a crop from Fusarium head blight, or scab.
Wisner concluded that the market makes no distinction between genetically modified crops for scab resistance vs. herbicide resistance.
Leake, who grew 1,200 acres of wheat in 2006, called scab "yesterday's problem," noting the success of North Dakota State University's Alsen wheat variety with its "excellent Fusarium resistance." He said success of conventional techniques is something proponents of genetic modification "publicly ignore."
"Fusarium head blight is not an important enough issue anymore to warrant the market risks of a GMO wheat introduction," he said, noting it would drop U.S. wheat prices to about $2 a bushel, which is the rough price for Canadian feed wheat.
WTO and ag issues
Leake said the fact that World Trade Organization talks are faltering on ag issues is an indication that the European Union is less likely to drop its restrictions on GMO crops.
Leake said the report's message is made even stronger by a separate event. Japan suspended imports of U.S. rice and the European Union imposed mandatory testing of all imported rice after the Bayer Corp. announced that traces of Liberty Link rice, a genetically modified rice, had been detected in commercial supplies.
"This is a warning," Leke said. "If we had contamination of a GMO in wheat, from everything they've said, they wouldn't import the wheat. Even if Japanese or European food agencies would relinquish a bit, that doesn't mean the milling industry is going to buy it. The paradigm hasn't changed."
Leake said the study runs counter to claims that if wheat can be genetically modified for weed protection, disease protection or for other consumer traits, the crop will be more able to compete against soybeans and corn for acres.
Wisner concludes that wheat acreage is declining because of more favorable U.S. farm support policies and because of expanding demand for ethanol and biodiesel.
4. Market boosts organic while GMOs wane
Daniel Mintz HUMBOLDT Genetically engineered crops are being upstaged by organic farming in Humboldt, as biotech trends continue to be offset by economic and political forces.
The growing demand for organic products, particularly dairy products, is being met with an increase in local organic farming. With Humboldt’s organic farming economy ascending, the use of genetically modified crops is believed to be on the wane, as local dairies are increasingly switching from conventional to organic production.
And the local campaign to protect crop integrity through voter-approved legislation will soon re-emerge. The treasurer and co-chair of the Humboldt Green Genes coalition has said that a new anti-GMO (genetically modified organism) ballot measure campaign will focus on the spring 2008 election.
That effort is still viable thanks to the recent rejection of Senate Bill 1056, the so-called "Monsanto law," named after its corporate sponsor, which would have blocked counties and cities from passing GMO bans.
But regulation of a different sort has vaulted the prevalence of organic farming in Humboldt County and the region surrounding it.
"A radical swing"
Market forces have strongly encouraged organic crop production here, as the demand for chemical-free food escalates nationwide.
Corn for livestock feed is the county's primary GMO crop, and Frank Holzberger, the county’s senior agricultural inspector, reports that an increase in organic dairies responds to market trends and may reflect a downturn in the local use of high-yield GMOs.
The county's first organic dairy established itself in 2001, Holzberger said, and he guessed that 30 more have come since. "More will soon," he continued. "The needle is going way toward organic."
The reason why is explained by the cornerstone of economics supply and demand.
"Economics is driving this," said Holzberger. "The demand for organic milk is so strong and supply is so limited, more dairies have gone the organic route."
With the organic food economy becoming more entrenched here, the need to protect it intensifies. One of the reasons why GMO crops are so controversial is concern over cross-pollination and contamination of non-GE crops. Holzberger thinks the advent of organic agriculture will be the ultimate GMO regulator.
"This is going to take care of itself," he said. "Recently, the dairies here have made a radical swing and it was the market that drove that."
Quantifying the trend is hard because its scale is more accurately gauged by numbers of cows rather numbers of diaries. And some conventional producers will continue to lean on GMO crops, but Holzberger thinks the organic upswing will crowd out GE farming.
"That would be a reasonable assumption to make, as the number of organic acres increase, and the numbers of conventional acres and cows decrease," he said.
Organic opportunity
The organic trend is also noted by Len Mayer, general manager of the North Coast Co-op, who said that the attention-getting growth of the organic market is magnetizing food producers.
Mayer said food markets usually match population hikes with two to three percent a year production increases. The growth rate of the organic market far exceeds those expectations, seeing 15 to 20 percent annual increases over the last ten years.
"That is getting everybody's attention," Mayer said. "And that's why even the big guys are entering the organic market."
The market for organic milk is wide open. "For a long time, there's been a surplus of milk in the U.S. and there's also been a shortage of organic milk," Mayer explained.
"Producers see that there is excess milk in the market on the conventional side, and the real opportunity is with organic."
The Ferndale-based Humboldt Creamery produces both its own conventional milk and organic milk for other distributors, but Mayer said the creamery's involvement in the organic market is about to become more evident with the production of organic milk under its own brand name.
"More and more products are going organic, and that is displacing conventional production," said Mayer.
Nevertheless, there will be political action to protect what has become a prized aspect of local economy. Mike Gann, Humboldt Green Genes' treasurer and co chair, said the anti-GMO coalition still has $9,000 left over from its 2004 campaign and will propose another ballot measure for the June 2008 election.
The first effort to pass a local anti-GMO law was dropped due to flaws in its content, but Gann noted the failure of SB1056, which would have exclusively placed all forms of seed and crop regulation with the state. He doesn't doubt that the biotech industry will again encourage legislation against local authority, and said that his coalition "remains steadfast in our commitment to draft a GMO-free ordinance."
And as organic food becomes more popular, the rationale for such an effort has a decidedly economic angle. "To have an anti-GMO measure gives us a record of GMO-free, safe food and it gives us a market advantage," said Gann, who pointed out that Mendocino County already has a GMO ban and the trend could become regional and define a united organic front.
"We definitely feel that our movement is spreading," Gann said.
5. Gene-altered rice from China found in EU
Science News BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European consumers are at risk from unauthorized
genetically modified (GMO) rice grown in China after evidence of a
strain was found in Britain, France and Germany, environment group
Greenpeace said on Tuesday.
The Chinese rice, modified to resist certain insects, was found in
samples of rice stick noodles in France and Germany, and also in rice
vermicelli in Britain, Greenpeace said, citing the results of two rounds
of laboratory tests.
Its report did not indicate the possible quantities involved but said
the GMO rice had been detected in different product brands found in
Asian Specialty stores and Asian restaurants.
"Innocent consumers again become the victims of the GE (genetic
engineering) industry's 'contamination first' strategy," Greenpeace
International GMO campaigner Jeremy Tager said in a statement.
The Chinese rice contained a protein that might cause allergenic
reactions in humans, he said. It was supposed to be used only in field
trials and was not approved for commercial growing because of concerns
about its safety.
The discovery of the experimental rice comes just a few weeks after the
European Union tightened requirements on U.S. long-grain imports to
prove the absence of another biotech rice type detected in samples
intended for commercial use.
The EU does not yet permit the sale, import or marketing of any biotech
rice on the territory of its 25 member countries.
"Once illegal GE crops are in the food chain, removing them takes
enormous effort and cost. It is easier to prevent contamination in the
first place," Tager said.
Last month, the EU-25 tightened requirements on U.S. long-grain rice
imports to prove the absence of the GMO strain LL Rice 601 marketed by
Germany's Bayer AG and produced in the United States.
The EU decision followed the discovery by U.S. authorities of trace
amounts of LL Rice 601, engineered to resist a herbicide, in long-grain
samples targeted for commercial use.
European consumers are well known for their wariness over GMO foods, but
the biotech industry says its products are perfectly safe and are no
different to conventional foods.
6. When genetically modified plants go wild
By Gregory M. Lamb In rice-growing states, traces of an unapproved genetically modified (GM) rice have been found mixed in with conventional rice meant for human consumption.
In Oregon, genetically engineered creeping bentgrass, being tested for possible use on golf courses, has been found miles outside its test beds, making it the first GM plant known to have escaped into the wild.
In Hawaii, a federal judge has admonished the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for displaying "utter disregard" for the state's endangered native plant species. The judge says the USDA failed to conduct research on the environmental effects of fields of experimental corn and sugarcane that had been genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals. Environmental and food-safety groups have asked for a moratorium on all field tests of experimental drug-producing plants until their safety precautions can be reviewed.
Early indications are that in each case little substantial harm has been done. The experimental rice, for example, is similar to two other GM strains already approved for general use.
But many who closely watch how biotechnology is changing agriculture, including those who see a valuable role for GM crops, are disturbed by what appears to be a series of recent incidents showing lax supervision of experimental plantings by the government and agribusinesses.
"You absolutely should be in compliance with regulations," says Martina Newell-McGloughlin, an internationally recognized advocate for the uses of biotechnology based in Davis, Calif. She directs the University of California's systemwide biotechnology program. The three incidents "aren't health concerns, but they are regulatory concerns," she says. "It's incumbent on the companies, on the USDA ... to ensure that everybody complies with these regulations."
The three incidents convey a message that "the US government has been somewhat lax in its oversight of the biotechnology industry and in some instances has not taken its responsibility to regulate as strongly as it should," says Gregory Jaffe, director of the biotechnology project for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group in Washington that has expressed qualified support for the use of genetic modification in agriculture.
"Clearly this shows that the companies and the government don't have as much control over experimental crops as they need to have," Mr. Jaffe says. "I think there's a sloppiness out there. Industry doesn't take the rules of conduct as seriously as it should."
Government agencies, he says, have adopted what almost amounts to a "don't look, don't find" policy. "We have a fairly passive regulatory system," he says, that does "a little spot checking" but mostly relies on businesses to step forward and report their own problems.
The cases of the escaped GM grass and the mysterious appearance of experimental rice in the food supply raise important questions, says Michael Fernandez, executive director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a nonprofit group in Washington that seeks to be an independent and objective source of information on agricultural biotechnology. "How do you know that [GM crops] are staying where you want them to stay?" he asks. "As there are more kinds of genetically-engineered crops out there, it continues to pose challenges for companies and for regulators."
Some amount of movement of GM crops outside their containment areas "is virtually inevitable," Mr. Fernandez says. "The question is, how do we feel about that? How important is that? Does it matter what the crop is?" The bentgrass may pose no significant danger, he says, but "would we feel differently" if it were a plant that produced pharmaceuticals?
Last December, a report from the USDA's own Office of the Inspector General urged the department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) division "to strengthen its accountability for field tests of [genetically enhanced] crops." The report added that "weaknesses in APHIS regulations and internal management controls increase the risk that regulated genetically engineered organisms (GEO) will inadvertently persist in the environment...."
The report also criticized APHIS for lacking "basic information about the field test sites it approves and is responsible for monitoring, including where and how the crops are being grown, and what becomes of them at the end of the field test."
In a response, APHIS agreed to implement 23 of the inspector general's 28 recommendations. Among those it rejected was a request to develop guidelines to physically restrict public access to unapproved edible GM crops.
US corn and cotton are mostly GM
America is awash in genetically modified crops that already have been approved for use both as animal feed and for human consumption. This year, 61 percent of all corn and 89 percent of all soybeans planted in the United States were GM varieties, the USDA estimates. More than 80 percent of the US cotton crop is also GM.
But despite that wide usage, the development of other applications and other crops has largely stalled. Plans to introduce a GM wheat to the market have yet to go forward. Nearly all widespread applications of GM to agriculture have been limited to two functions: enhancing resistance to insects or to herbicides. Plans to alter plants through genetic modification to improve such qualities as their flavor, growth rates, or size have yet to blossom.
Suspicion of GM foods in Europe, and to some extent in Asia, is limiting the world market for GM crops. China had been expected to OK the use of GM rice by now, but appears to be dragging its feet. After the news spread that unapproved GM long-grain rice had been found in US consumer supplies, the European Union announced it would require imports of long-grain rice from the US to be certified as free from the GM strain. Japan has suspended its imports of American long-grain rice pending further review.
Farmers sue over 'contaminated' rice
Earlier this month, the USDA reported that a long-grain GM rice strain produced by Bayer CropScience had been found in bins of conventional commercial rice. It marked the first instance in which an unapproved GM rice had been found in the rice supply. The GM rice poses no health or environmental threat, the USDA said. But rice farmers in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas filed a lawsuit against Bayer this week alleging its genetically modified rice contaminated the crop, according to the Associated Press.
The USDA is conducting an investigation to determine how the contamination occurred, and Bayer now is petitioning to have the strain approved for general use, a spokesman for APHIS says.
In Oregon, APHIS is continuing to monitor the escaped creeping bentgrass, an APHIS spokeswoman says.
The ruling in Hawaii by a federal judge was the first to involve drug-producing GM plants. A coalition of consumer and environmental groups is asking that the government suspend all field tests of drug-producing plants until its process for issuing permits can be reviewed.
In addition, says Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, a consumer group in Washington that is among those seeking a moratorium, the USDA should follow all the recommendations in its inspector general's report. It should also take additional measures, such as regularly testing fields neighboring GM test beds for potential contamination, he says.
But Dr. Newell-McGloughlin hopes that this summer's outbreak of GM fiascos won't be taken out of context.
"The few missteps that have occurred, in my opinion, are tiny in the context of the large amount of good that has been done with this [GM] technology," she says. Genetic manipulation has much more promise for good that has yet to be tapped. By overreacting, we could miss out." The risks, she says, always must be weighed against the benefits. "There is the cost of not doing something," she says.
7. Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll announces six state class action filed against Bayer CropScience over rice contamination
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 28, 2006--Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, PLLC announced today that it has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of rice farmers in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and California against Bayer CropScience for contaminating the U.S. rice crop. Plaintiffs filed their suit this afternoon in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas in Little Rock. The United States Department of Agriculture recently announced that genetically modified rice, developed and tested by Bayer, had been found in samples taken from commercial long grain rice. Bayer's genetically modified rice has not been approved for human consumption.
The legal complaint alleges that Bayer failed to prevent their unapproved rice from entering the food chain. As a result of Bayer's actions, Japan and the European Union have placed strict limits on U.S. rice imports and the prices for U.S. rice have dropped dramatically.
The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as an injunction requiring Bayer to clean up the contamination from Bayer's genetically modified rice. According to the USDA, Rice production in the U.S. is valued at about $1.9 billion. The market price of U.S. rice has dropped approximately ten percent since Bayer first announced that unapproved rice had been found in the food chain.
Richard S. Lewis, a partner and environmental legal expert with the Cohen, Milstein firm, explained that, "Our clients feel that Bayer should have taken stricter steps when growing this genetically modified rice to prevent it from contaminating the commercial rice market. Bayer's actions have resulted in an unprecedented price drop financially impacting all rice farmers."
Cohen, Milstein, a Washington, DC based firm, is one of the largest law firms in the country devoted exclusively to representing plaintiffs. Previously the firm successfully represented corn farmers in a class action against Aventis for contaminating the corn market with StarLink genetically modified corn, which had also not been approved for human consumption. Ralph Cloar, Jr. of the Cloar Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas is also serving as co-counsel in the case.
A copy of the complaint is available and can be emailed to members of the media, please contact James Pizzirusso at Cohen, Milstein 202 589-2257 or jpizzirusso@cmht.com
8. US rice farmers sue Bayer CropScience over GM rice
LOS ANGELES, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Rice farmers in Arkansas, Missouri,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and California have sued Bayer
CropScience, alleging its genetically modified rice has contaminated
the crop, attorneys for the farmers said on Monday.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the
Eastern District of Arkansas in Little Rock, law firm Cohen, Milstein,
Hausfeld & Toll said in a statement.
The farmers alleged that the unit of Germany's Bayer AG As a result, they said, Japan and the European Union have placed strict
limits on U.S. rice imports and U.S. rice prices have dropped
dramatically.
A Bayer representative could not be immediately reached for comment.
U.S. agriculture and food safety authorities learned on July 31 that
Bayer's unapproved rice had been found in commercial bins in Arkansas
and Missouri. While the United States is a small rice grower, it is one
of the world's largest exporters, sending half of its crop to foreign
buyers.
The genetically engineered long grain rice has a protein known as
Liberty Link, which allows the crop to withstand applications of an
herbicide used to kill weeds.
The European Commission said on Wednesday the EU would require U.S.
long grain rice imports to be certified as free from the unauthorized
strain. The commission said validated tests must be done by an
accredited laboratory and be accompanied by a certificate.
Japan, the largest importer of U.S. rice, suspended imports of U.S.
long-grain rice a week ago.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration
have said there are no public health or environmental risks associated
with the genetically engineered rice.
The United States is expected to produce a rice crop valued at $1.88
billion in 2006. U.S. rice growers are responsible for about 12 percent
of world rice trade. Three-fourths of the crop is long grain, grown
almost entirely in the lower Mississippi Valley. California, the No. 2
rice state, grows short grain rice.
9. Monsanto buys 'Terminator' seeds company
by F. William Engdahl The United States Government has been financing research on a genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, will give its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or regions. The Government has been working quietly on this technology since 1983. Now, the little-known company that has been working in this genetic research with the Government's US Department of Agriculture-- Delta & Pine Land-- is about to become part of the world's largest supplier of patented genetically-modified seeds (GMO), Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri.
Relations between Monsanto, Delta & Pine Land and the USDA, on closer scrutiny, show the deep and dark side of the much-heralded genetic revolution in agriculture. It proves deep-held suspicions that the Gene Revolution is not about 'solving the world hunger problem' as its advocates claim. It's about handing over control of the seeds for mankind’s basic food supply - rice, corn, soybeans, wheat, even fruit, vegetables and cotton - to privately owned corporations. Once the seeds and their use are patented and controlled by one or several private agribusiness multinationals, it will be they who can decide whether or not a particular customer - let's say for argument, China or Brazil or India or Japan - whether they will or won't get the patented seeds from Monsanto, or from one of its licensee GMO partners like Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta or DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred International.
While most of us don't bother to reflect on where the corn in the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or the rice in a box of Uncle Ben's Converted Rice come from, when we grab it from the supermarket shelf, they all must originate with seeds. Seeds can either be taken by a farmer from the previous season's seeds, and planted to produce the next harvest. Or, seeds can be bought new each harvest season, from the companies which sell their seeds.
The advent of commercial GMO seeds in the early 1990's allowed companies like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow Chemicals to go from supplying agriculture chemical herbicides like Roundup, to patenting genetically altered seeds for basic farm crops like corn, rice, soybeans or wheat. For almost a quarter century, since 1983, the US Government has quietly been working to perfect a genetically engineered technique whereby farmers would be forced to turn to their seed supplier each harvest to get new seeds. The seeds would only produce one harvest. After that the seeds from that harvest would commit 'suicide' and be unusable.
There has been much hue and cry, correctly so, that this process, patented 'suicide' seeds, officially termed GURTs (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), is a threat to poor farmers in developing countries like India or Brazil, who traditionally save their own seeds for the next planting. In fact, GURTs, more popularly referred to as Terminator seeds for the brutal manner in which they kill off plant reproduction possibilities, is a threat to the food security as well of North America, Western Europe, Japan and anywhere Monsanto and its elite cartel of GMO agribusiness partners enters a market.
The Curious History of Delta & Pine Land
Delta & Pine Land is a company that, despite the pine in its name, has deep roots. Founded in 1888, it has its headquarters at One Cotton Row in Scott, Mississippi, nestled between Goat Island and Choktaw Bar Island on the Mississippi River, near the Arkansas border. However, the people running things at Delta Pine are anything but your typical Mississippi black-dirt cotton farmers.
In 1983, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL) joined with the US Department of Agriculture in a project to develop Terminator seeds. It was one of the earliest experiments with GMO. It was a long-term project. The US Government has been serious about Terminator beginning more than two decades ago.
In March 1998 the US Patent Office granted Patent No. 5,723,765 to Delta & Pine Land for a patent titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The patent is owned jointly, according to Delta & Pine's Security & Exchange Commission 10K filing, 'by D&PL and the United States of America, as represented by the Secretary of Agriculture.'
The patent has global coverage. To quote further from the official D&PL SEC filing, 'The patent broadly covers all species of plant and seed, both transgenic (GMO-ed) and conventional, for a system designed to allow control of progeny seed viability without harming the crop' (sic).
Then, in a manner reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell's novel, 1984, D&PL claims, 'One application of the technology could be to control unauthorized planting of seed of proprietary varieties…by making such a practice non-economic since non-authorized saved seed will not germinate, and, therefore, would be useless for planting.' D&PL calls the thousand-year-old tradition of farmer-saved seed by the pejorative term, 'brown bagging' as though it is something dirty and corrupt.
Translated into lay language, D&PL officially declares the purpose of its Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, is to prevent farmers who once get trapped into buying transgenic or GMO seeds from a company such as Monsanto or Syngenta, from 'brown bagging' or being able to break free of control of their future crops by Monsanto and friends. As D&PL puts it, their patent gives them 'the prospect of opening significant worldwide seed markets to the sale of transgenic technology in varietal crops in which crop seed currently is saved and used in subsequent seasons as planting seed.'
Instead, the farmer or the country whose farmers depend on Monsanto patented GMO seeds must pay a license fee to Monsanto each year to get new seeds. 'No tickee, no laundy,' as the old Brooklyn poet would say.
Terminator is the answer to the agribusiness dream of controlling world food production. No longer would they need to hire expensive detectives to spy on whether farmers were re-using Monsanto or other GMO patented seed. Terminator corn or soybeans or cotton seeds could be genetically modified to 'commit suicide' after one harvest season. That would automatically prevent farmers from saving and re-using the seed for the next harvest. The technology would be a means of enforcing Monsanto or other GMO patent rights, and forcing payment of farmer use fees not only in developing economies, where patent rights were, understandably, little respected, but also in industrial OECD countries.
With Terminator patent rights, once a country such as Argentina or Brazil or Iraq or the USA or Canada opened its doors to the spread of GMO patented seeds among its farmers, their food security would be potentially hostage to a private multinational company, a company which, for whatever reasons, especially given its intimate ties to the US Government, might decide to use 'food as a weapon' to compel a US-friendly policy from that country or group of countries.
Sound far-fetched? Go back to what then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did in countries like Allende's Chile to force a regime change to a 'US-friendly' Pinochet dictatorship by withholding USAID and private food exports to Chile. Kissinger dubbed it 'food as a weapon.' Terminator is merely the logical next step in food weapon technology.
The role of the US Government in backing and financing Delta & Pine Land's decades of Terminator research is even more revealing. As Kissinger said back in the 1970's, 'Control the oil and you can control entire Continents. Control food and you control people…'
In a June 1998 interview, USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps, defined the US Government policy on Terminator seeds. He explained that USDA wanted the technology to be ‘widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies.’ He meant agribusiness GMO giants like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow. The USDA was open about their reasons: They wanted to get Terminator seeds into the developing world where the Rockefeller Foundation had made eventual proliferation of genetically engineered crops the heart of its GMO strategy from the beginnings of its rice genome project in 1984.
USDA’s Phelps stated that the US Government’s goal in fostering the widest possible development of Terminator technology was ‘to increase the value of proprietary seed owned by US seed companies and to open up new markets in Second and Third World countries.’
Under WTO rules on free trade in agriculture, countries are forbidden to impose their own national health restrictions on GMO imports if it is deemed to be an ‘unfair trade barrier.’ It begins to become clear why it was the US Government and US agribusiness which during the late 1980’s pushed at the GATT Uruguay Round for creation of a World Trade Organization, with its supranational arbitrary powers over world agriculture trade. It all fits into a neat picture of patented seeds, forced on reluctant WTO member nations, under threat of WTO sanctions, and now of Terminator or suicide seeds.
A closer look at who runs and owns Delta & Pine Land is instructive.
Arkansas Politics and D&PL
The largest shareholder in D&PL is the Stephens Group of Little Rock, Arkansas. Here is where things become interesting indeed.
The man who is Chairman of the Board of DP&L is Jon E.M. Jacoby, who came to DP&L as representative of the Stephens Group. Jacoby is a Director and Vice Chairman of The Stephens Group LLC, the Arkansas-based private equity firm owned by the Stephens family.
The Stephens Group prides itself on being the nation's largest investment bank outside Wall Street, based, of all places, in little ol' Little Rock, in hillbilly land, Arkansas, one of the poorest states in the United States. Stephens Inc. is also one of the biggest institutional shareholders in 30 large multinationals including the Arkansas based firms Tyson Food, the world’s largest chicken industrial factory operation and the infamous Arkansas giant, Wal-Mart.
Jackson Stephens, who founded the group with his brother, Witt, were more than just lucky Arkansas bankers and billionaires. Stephens evidently built his career and fortune by being connected to the ‘right’ people. He was a US Naval Academy classmate of Jimmy Carter and during the Georgia bank scandals of President Carter’s Office of Management & Budget chief, Bert Lance, it was Jack Stephens who stepped in to bail Lance out of an extremely embarrassing financial debacle with Lance’s old bank, National Bank of Georgia.
How Stephens helped Jimmy Carter’s fellow Georgia buddy, Lance, is the interesting part. Stephens introduced Lance to a Pakistani businessman, Agha Hasan Abedi. Abedi was the founder of a curious Luxembourg-registered, London-based bank called BCCI.
In 1990, BCCI was convicted of money laundering for the Columbian Cocaine Cartels in Miami.
In October, 1992, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released an 800-page report on the BCCI collapse. They called the BCCI scandal, ‘the largest case of organized crime in history, spanning over some 72 nations,’ adding that it represented an ‘international financial crime on a massive and global scale,’ and that the bank ‘systematically bribed world leaders and political figures throughout the world.’
The Senate report concluded that among the provable charges against BCCI were ‘BCCI's criminality, including fraud…involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the America; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; its support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; its management of prostitution; its commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; its illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.’
Jackson Stephens was no casual business acquaintance of BCCI’s Agha Hasan Abedi. In response to the concerns over Jackson Stephens' involvement in BCCI, the Ohio Attorney General noted in a 1993 report, ‘Stephens' name has been linked to securities violations that allegedly occurred when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a foreign bank dominated by Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi, acquired stock and control over the Washington-based First American Bank.’ In 1991, Stephens joined BCCI investor Mochtar Riady in buying BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.
The Stephens Group was well-connected to another interesting Asian banking group, the billionaire Indonesian Riady family of Moktar and his son James Riady, who own the Lippo Bank in Indonesia. The Riadys are Chinese-Indonesian businessmen who, of all places, moved to Arkansas in the 1970’s, despite holding billions of assets in Asia. Stephens and Riady hit it off and soon Stephens and Riady bought a bank in Hong Kong. Stephens then invited Riady to invest in a Little Rock, Arkansas bank called Worthen.
BCCI and Jackson Stephens, chairman of the Stephens Group of Arkansas were well known to one another. Stephens Group board member, Jon E.M. Jacoby, today Chairman of Delta & Pine Land, and still a Vice Director of The Stephens Group, was a very senior, trusted member of the Stephens’ inside circle for more than 35 years.
Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group financially staked Sam Walton when he started Wal-Mart in 1970. Stephens also financed Tyson Foods to become the agribusiness global giant it is today. Jon Jacoby, as senior executive of the Stephens Group, had arranged the 1970 Wal-Mart deal. Jon E.M. Jacoby and Jackson Stephens went way back.
Jacoby was Vice President of Stephens Inc. in the early 1990’s, shortly after the BCCI scandals and early into the Presidency of another Jackson Stephens protégé, former Arkansas Governor and recipient of Stephens’ political largess, William Jefferson Clinton.
When an Arkansas reporter questioned Jacoby on allegations of Clinton’s alleged corruption as Governor of Arkansas, Jacoby quipped, “You see a girl walking down the street. You can say, ‘There goes a beautiful girl’ or "There goes a whore.’ What the hell's the difference? They've both got legs.”
Arkansas politics is known for its colorful metaphors and its colorful politicians like William Jefferson Clinton. It’s good to get a little of the flavor of this Arkansas colorfulness to get a better picture of Delta & Pine Land.
Stephens Group, Tyson Farms and Other Arkansas Fairy Tales
A tangled web of relations links the Stephens Group and Delta & Pine Land of Scott, Mississippi with another satellite in the agribusiness orbit of the influential Stephens Group. The Stephens Group is also linked intimately with Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the US’ largest agribusiness processor of industrialized chicken meat, and arguably one of its most unsanitary ones.
Tyson Foods curiously emerged from the recent Avian Flu (H5N1) virus scare as a winner, using the lie that their factory farm mass-bred assembly-line chickens were more ‘sanitary’ than free-roaming small farm chickens of Asia.
Washington Administrations, at least since the Presidency of Bill Clinton, seem to have a love affair of some sort with Tyson Foods.
It began when Clinton sought to name an Arkansas crony, Mike Espy, to be his Secretary of Agriculture. Before Clinton could submit Espy’s name to the Senate for confirmation, however, Espy was sent to Arkansas for a meeting that would decide if Espy had the right stuff. The meeting was with Don Tyson, head of Tyson Foods.
Tyson apparently concluded that Espy indeed had the right stuff, at least as far as Tyson was concerned. Soon after being named head of USDA, Espy enacted measures significantly weakening Federal chicken waste and contamination standards. That opened the floodgates for expansion of Tyson Foods chicken factory farms into the huge concentrations of chicken waste and rivers overflowing with toxic pollution in Arkansas and beyond.
The Wall Street Journal on May 28, 2003 reviewed the allegations surrounding then-President Clinton and his wife, Hillary. They detailed some relevant points from the Clintons’ Arkansas days:
1977
Hillary Rodham Clinton joins the Rose Law Firm. Jackson Stephens joins with former Carter administration budget director Bert Lance and a group of Mideast investors--later identified as key figures in the corrupt Bank of Credit & Commerce International--in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Financial General Bankshares in Washington, D.C
1978
October: Mrs. Clinton, now a partner at the Rose Firm, begins a series of commodities trades under the guidance of Tyson Foods executive Jim Blair, earning nearly $100,000. (author’s emphasis). The trades are not revealed until March 1994.
November: Bill Clinton is elected Governor of Arkansas.
The Rose law firm was the house law firm of Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group investment bank in Little Rock. To be the corporate law firm of the Stephens Group was no casual affair. It implied a deep trust relationship and perhaps more. As one crony of Jackson Stephens put it at that time, ‘Jackson Stephens? He’s the man who owns Arkansas.’
The head of the prestigious Rose law firm in Little Rock in those days was C. Joseph Giroir jr. In 1977 Giroir hired a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton to work for Rose. It was all one cozy Arkansas-Indonesia family back then.
The Wall Street Journal commentary on the Clinton years had the following entry for 1987, as Clinton was still Arkansas Governor:
1987:
Officials at investment giant Stephens Inc., including longtime Clinton friend, David Edwards, take steps to rescue Harken Energy, a struggling Texas oil company with George W. Bush on its board. Over the next three years, Mr. Edwards brings BCCI-linked investors and advisers into Harken deals. One of them, Abdullah Bakhsh, purchases $10 million in shares of Stephens-dominated Worthen Bank. (author’s emphasis).
Jackson Stephens’ political largesse was non-partisan: Democrats Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and then Republican George W. Bush, the man now in the White House as Monsanto seeks approval to take over the Stephens Group’s Delta & pine land.
In December 1992, just after Clinton had been elected President in a campaign financed at critical points by Jackson Stephens and friends, including the Indonesian-American Riady family, Vince Foster, an Arkansas friend of the Clinton’s, and a law partner at Hillary’s Rose law firm, met James McDougal. Foster arranged for McDougal to buy the Clintons' remaining shares in Whitewater Development Co. That land deal was focus of Congressional investigation of the Clintons. McDougal was loaned the money for the purchase by Tyson Foods counsel Jim Blair, the long-time Clinton friend and commodities adviser who in 1978 had ‘tutored’ Hillary in her fabulously successful commodities speculation. The loan by Tyson’s Jim Blair to McDougal was never repaid.
No sooner did Bill and Hillary Clinton move into the White House, and the Tyson Foods-approved Mike Espy took over as US Secretary of Agriculture, than Hillary’s former law partner, Joseph Giroir, set up a corporation. It was called Arkansas International Development Corporation (AIDC). In fact, it appears that the AIDC was set up to do joint ventures with the Indonesian Lippo Group of the business partners of Jackson Stephens, Mokhtar and James Riady.
The Arkansas International Development Corporation brokered a deal between Indonesia’s Lippo Group and Arkansas’ Tyson Foods that opened Indonesia to import Tyson Foods industrially-produced Arkansas factory farm chickens. One food Indonesia does not need to import is certainly chickens. The cheap Arkansas imports destroyed the fragile economy of domestic Indonesian small family chicken farmers.
Another project of AIDC was to issue bonds to build an airport in the Arkansas backwoods for the sole purpose of shipping Tyson Farms chickens to Indonesia. Recall that Clinton’s wife had been profiting from the trading advice of Tyson Foods since October 1978, a month before her husband became Governor.
Under the Clinton Presidency, agribusiness, especially agribusiness tied to the Stephens’ interests, made huge advances.
Agriculture Secretary Espy was forced to resign in October 1994, and was indicted on charges of accepting bribes and other gratuities. Among the charges against him were making false statements, concealing money from prohibited sources, illegal gratuities, illegal contributions, falsifying records, interstate transportation of stolen property, money laundering, and illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies. The largest corporate offender was Tyson Foods. Tyson had illegally offered Espy $12,000 in airplane rides, football tickets and other payoffs. Espy got off because the law makes it easier to convict a briber than a bribee. Tyson paid the government $6 million to close its case.
Tyson had been enthusiastic supporters of the Clinton family for years. In 1994, Time reported that a senior pilot for Tyson, Joe Henrickson, had been grilled for three days by the Espy Independent Prosecutor, Dan Smaltz, and FBI agents. They grilled the Tyson pilot about earlier transfers of cash to the (Arkansas) Governor's (Bill Clinton) mansion. According to Time, Henrickson claimed to have carried white envelopes containing a quarter-inch stack of $100 bills on six occasions.
Time magazine reported that, ‘In one case, [Henrickson claimed] a Tyson executive handed him an envelope of cash in the company's aircraft hanger in Fayetteville and said, 'This is for Governor Clinton.’ Arkansas has its political traditions and the Stephens and Tyson families are evidently skilled practitioners of that art.
The real interest in Jacoby’s Delta & Pine Land
By now the question comes, what is so attractive about the Stephens Group’s Delta & Pine Land that Monsanto makes its second bid to add it to its global genetically-engineered seeds empire?
It’s the patent Delta & Pine Land, together with the US Government, holds--Patent No. 5,723,765, titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The USDA through its Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) in Lubbock, Texas, as already noted, has worked with Delta & Pine Land since 1983 to perfect Terminator GMO technology. Patent No. 5,723,765 is the patent for Terminator technology.
One year later, in early 1999 Monsanto, the largest producer of GMO seeds and related agri-chemicals, announced it was acquiring Delta & Pine Land along with Delta’s Terminator patents.
In October 1999, however, following a worldwide storm of protest against Terminator seeds that threatened the very future of the Rockefeller Foundation’s ‘Gene Revolution’ Dr. Gordon Conway, President of the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation, met privately with the Board of Directors of Monsanto. Conway convinced Monsantom that for the long-term future of their GMO Project, they must go public to indicate to a worried world that it would not ‘commercialize’ Terminator. Development of the genetic revolution and genetic engineering as a research area had been the project of the Rockefeller Foundation over decades, along with researchers in the family’s Rockefeller University.
The Anglo-Swiss Syngenta joined with Monsanto in declaring solemnly that they would also not commercialize their work on GURTS or Terminator suicide seed technology.
That 1999 announcement took enormous pressure off of Monsanto and the agribusiness GMO giants, allowing them to advance the proliferation of their patented GMO seeds globally. Terminator could come later, once farmers and entire national agriculture areas like North America or Argentina or India had been taken over by GMO crops. Then, of course, it would be too late. The Rockefeller-Monsanto 1999 press conference was clearly application of classic Lenin Bolshevik tactics—Two Steps Forward, One Step Back…
Despite the Monsanto declaration of a moratorium on Terminator development, the US Government and the again independent Delta & Pine Land refused to drop their Terminator development.
In 2000, a year after the Monsanto Terminator moratorium announcement, the Clinton Administration’s USDA Secretary, Dan Glickman, refused repeated efforts by various agriculture and NGO organizations to drop the Government’s support for Terminator or GURTs. His Department’s feeble excuse for not dropping support for the work with Delta & Pine Land was that it allowed the US Government to put ‘leverage’ on D&PL to ‘protect the public interest.’ Six years later it became clear: the only leverage the US Government had put on D&PL’s commercialization efforts on GURTs had been to lever it into commercial reality.
Delta Vice President, Harry Collins, declared at the time in a press interview in the Agra/Industrial Biotechnology Legal Letter, ‘We’ve continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System (TPS or Terminator). We never really slowed down. We’re on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off.’
Nor did their partner, the United States Department of Agriculture, back down on Terminator after 1999. In 2001 the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) website announced: ‘USDA has no plans to introduce TPS into any germplasm…Our involvement has been to help develop the technology, not to assist companies to use it.’ As if to say, ‘see, our hands are clean.’ Then they went on to say the USDA was, ‘committed to making the [Terminator] technology as widely available as possible, so that its benefits will accrue to all segments of society (sic)…ARS intends to do research on other applications of this unique gene control discovery…When new applications are at the appropriate stage of development, this technology will also be transferred to the private sector for commercial application.’ Terminator was alive and well inside the Washington bureaucracy.
In 2001, the USDA and Delta & Pine executed a Commercialization Agreement for Terminator, its infamous Patent No. 5,723,765. The Government and Delta & Pine Land were not at all concerned about worldwide outcry against Terminator.
That announcement came two years after Monsanto had dropped its planned takeover of D&PL, with its Terminator patents.
The world was left with the (misleading) impression that Terminator was dead. Reality was it was anything but dead. Seven years later, long after public outcry against Terminator technology had died down, Monsanto re-entered and bought Delta & Pine Land and its Terminator patents.
Delta & Pine Land’s global net
The key scientific member of the Delta & Pine Land board since 1993 has been Dr. Nam-Hai Chua. Chua, 62, is also head of the Rockefeller University Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory in New York, and has been for over 25 years, the labs which are at the heart of the Rockefeller Foundation’s decades-long development, and spending of more than $100 millions of its own research grants to create their Gene Revolution. Until 1995, Chua was also a scientific consultant to Monsanto Corporation, as well as to DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred International. Chua is at the heart of Rockefeller’s Gene Revolution. And, clearly, Delta & Pine Land and their research on Terminator have been in the center of that work.
Delta & Pine Land is well-placed globally to proliferate its suicide seeds now, with the corporate and financial clout of the giant Monsanto company. Delta & Pine already has subsidiaries including D&PL Argentina, D&PL China, D&PL China PTE in Singapore, Deltapine Paraguay, Delta Pine de Mexico, Deltapine Australia, Hebei Ji Dai Cottonseed Technology Company in China, CDM Mandiyu in Argentina, Delta and Pine Land Hellas in Greece, D&M Brazil Algodao of Brazil, D&PL India, D&PL Mauritius Ltd.
This vast global network combined with Monsanto's dominant position in the GMO seeds and agri-chemicals market along with the unique DP&L Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, now give Monsanto and its close friends in Washington an enormous advance in their plans to dominate world food and plant seed use.
F. William Engdahl is Contributing Editor of Global Research and author of the soon-to-be-released book, Seeds of Destruction: the Dark Side of Genetically-engineered Food. He also authored 'A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,' Pluto Press, He may be contacted at his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
| |
