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Commercial Interests Compromise GMO Scientists’ Claims

Sunday, November 16, 2008
Posted in Genetic Engineering News | Tagged Genetic Engineering, News

The GM Biosafety Symposium being held in Wellington this week has been positioned to journalists as a chance for researchers to exchange ideas on the risk of GMO’s. But many of the speakers at the media-briefing on Monday are scientists with vested interests in promoting the hasty commercialisation of GMO’s for private gain, and seek to profit by allowing risks to be ‘socialised’ onto the wider community. Other speakers from overseas have also been lobbying at the UN for a weakening of the Cartegena rules.

“Claims of scientific safety made by those directly benefitting from commercial ventures are compromised by a blind-eye being turned to new independent information about the complexities of gene-functioning, and to the proven risks to society from unbridled commercialisation of gene technology,” says Jon Carapiet from GE Free NZ in food and environment.

“Early-stage research is being rushed to commercial outputs, largely with patenting and license-fees in mind. This Symposium is a talkfest for people who believe that is acceptable,” says Jon Carapiet. “Using commercial terms to describe their attitude to what is happening to nature; the ‘property rights’ of our ancestors, everyone alive today and of future generations are being lost by the privatisation of lifeforms and natural ecosystems.”

The criteria for GMO safety and regulation cannot be left in the hands of those with most to gain from commercial science, including staff at government agencies who are part of the “revolving door” with industry that results in commercial GMO-users gaining approval from their former employees.

The question and answer media session being run by the Science Media Centre which is promoting the conference, is only open to a hand picked media contingent. The Science Media Centre has also shown it lacks credibility as a source of balanced information, having remained noticeably silent in discussions of the ethical, environmental and economic risks to New Zealand from AgResearch’s plans to go into commercial production using a wide range of GE animals around the country.

“The GE Free media representative was initially approved and then declined an invitation to attend the briefing. This shows that the organised media event is being managed to avoid any risk of the scientists being asked difficult questions,” says Claire Bleakley President of GE Free NZ, who will be attending the Conference. “We hope the media will not be hoodwinked into accepting hand-fed selective opinion that fails to reflect the full range of independent published data on the dangers posed by GMO’s.”

Ends

References 1,2:

1) Beyond fear and loathing
Scientists answer media’s questions on GMOs
How do we know if genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe? Media are invited to hear from, and pose questions to, biosafety researchers and regulators at a briefing to be held at the Oceania Breakout Room South at The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on Monday 17 November, from 12.45 p.m. to 2 p.m.The panel will feature a number of prominent New Zealand and international scientists who are actively involved in field trials of GMOs and on the forefront of this evolving science. This will be an opportunity for you to get expert opinion on the science behind genetic modification and ask any burning questions directly of the scientists involved.

The briefing is part of the 10th International Symposium on the Biosafety of Genetically Modified Organisms (GM Biosafety Symposium), in conjunction with the Science Media Centre, and will be co-chaired by International Society for Biosafety Research (ISBR) President Joachim Schiemann, from Germany, and Libby Harrison, General Manager of the New Organisms Group at the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA New Zealand).

Additional speakers include:

ISBR President Elect Patrick Rüdelsheim, from Belgium.
Programme Chair for this year’s symposium Jeremy Sweet, from the United Kingdom.

 
Christian Walter from Scion (formerly New Zealand’s Forest Research Institute).
Australia’s Acting Gene Technology Regulator Elizabeth Flynn.

Tony Conner, a senior scientist at Crop & Food Research, New Zealand.

Götz Lable from AgResearch, New Zealand.

Rosie Hails, a professor at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Oxford, United Kingdom.The session will be informal in nature, and a buffet lunch will be provided.

Notes to editors:
The GM Biosafety Symposium will be held in Wellington from 16-21 November, marking the first time an Australasian country has played host to this prestigious biennial event. The symposium is an opportunity for biosafety researchers and those engaged in the risk assessment and regulation of GMOs from around the world to share information and exchange ideas; it is organised by the ISBR,a not-for-profit organisation that promotes sound scientific investigation into the safe use of GMOs.For more information, including the full conference programme, please visit the symposium website:www.isbgmo.info.

The Science Media Centre is an independent source of expert opinion and information for journalists covering science and technology in New Zealand. Its aim is to promote accurate, bias-free reporting on science and technology by helping the media work more closely with the scientific community. 

2) Edging Towards BioUtopia: A New Politics of Reordering Life and the Democratic Challenge

Richard Hindmarsh (UWA Press, April 2008, Paper Back, 330pp, $34.95)

Edging Towards BioUtopia will interest farmers concerned about any introduction of GM crops. The book offers insights into the shaping of regulation for the environmental release of GMOs through tracing the roles, responsibilities and decision-making practices within a context of science, big business and politics. It analyses how governments and policy-makers have accommodated this relatively recent technological phenomenon. Overall, the book paints a disturbing picture of how lessons that might have followed the earlier (non-)regulation of chemical and nuclear technologies need to re-learned with any introduction of genetically engineered organisms. As a recent review in the UK journal Science as Culture reflected: “Edging Towards BioUtopia goes a long way towards disturbing and discrediting proponents’ rosy picture of a quasi-pastoral, benign yet fecund, genetically engineered ‘futurenatural’ (p. 1).”

The book’s central argument is that a coalition of GM interests and resulting regulatory settings reflect a limited number of (risky) perspectives, and that this raises profound questions about how broader perspectives, such as those of farmers, the prime constituency for the adoption of new agricultural technologies, might be accommodated. I identify this as a ‘central democratic challenge’, as a conflict between ‘biotechnology interests’ (or the ‘bioscientific club’) and the broader publics’ “inherent right to question the creation and use of novel organisms because of the potential adverse social and environmental consequences” (p 3). Overall, the ‘democratic challenge’ addresses the marginalisation of alternative visions and viewpoints of contesting publics, scientists, farmers and bureaucrats that might have been expected to participate in developing the regulatory arrangements. So far, those arrangements favour ‘biotechnology interests’, a situation recently reinforced by the ‘engineered collapse’ of the Victorian and NSW moratoriums on the commercial release of GM canola.

The significance of this book, as the first in-depth study of the topic in Australia, is that it demonstrates in intimate detail-through governmental, university and NGO archives as well as material obtained under Freedom of Information laws, media reportage both local and global, and public relations material-how this has happened. Key regulatory events are traced from the early misgivings about ‘gene-splicing’ experiments and the construction of minimalist self-regulation (Chapter 4), to the consolidation of minimalist self-regulation through institutions, political actions and texts depicting gene technology as safe (Chapter 5), to the rise of dissenting publics, scientists and bureaucrats (Chapters 6, 7 and 8), and to the capture of policy and regulation by ‘biotechnology interests’ crystallising in the Gene Technology Act 2000 (Cth) and its application (Chapters 9, 10 and 11).

The latter chapters also introduce the contestation of both organic and conventional farmers and new farmer organisations such as the Network of Concerned Farmers and their extended criticism of a regulatory regime that excludes livelihood (or social and economic) issues about contamination of non-GM crops through gene transfer, for example, through pollination, from GM crops. The latter threat is highlighted through a rather grim assessment of regulatory effectiveness, especially in relation to multiple regulatory breaches involving GM strains of canola released into the Australian environment by Monsanto and Bayer CropScience.

Considering all the evidences, in the epilogue of Edging Towards BioUtopia, I outline the need for a new regulatory approach: one involving the public sphere and a broadening of expertise away from GM developers; one that acknowledges subjective judgements in risk assessment; one that also considers the social and economic impacts of biotechnological change, coupled to an ecological understanding of environmental impacts (p 267).

The overall lesson is that a meaningfully open process of social management and evaluation is needed to ensure ‘democracy’ and the viability of agricultural and environmental sustainability. As the Science as Culture review noted: “At stake, after all, is nothing less than the course of social-not to mention biological-evolution; the public’s right to make informed choices, and the opportunity to participate in the navigation of appropriate technological pathways to the future.”

By Richard Hindmarsh, senior lecturer in environmental politics and policy at Griffith School of Environment, University Brisbane. r.hindmarsh@griffith.edu.au