Was 2009 the year the world turned against GM?

Despite promising the world in 2009, biotech corporations have increasingly raised the hackles of scientists and citizens worldwide
2009 was a year in which the biotech industry, Gates and their US Administration allies did everything in their power to drive the world down the GM road, but it was also a year marked by remarkable global resistance.

It was a year too in which the truth emerged more clearly than ever about not just the severe limitations and risks of GM crops, but the viability of the many positive alternatives to GMOs alternatives from which the profit-driven GM-fixation diverts much needed attention and resources.

The scene had been set in 2008 with the IAASTD report, produced by 400 scientific experts and signed up to by some 60 governments. That made it clear that after more than 10 years of commercialisation, GM crops had done nothing to help with the eradication of hunger or poverty, or the reversal of the environmental degradation caused by agriculture.

The IAASTD instead championed as the way forward: agro-ecological farming; and research conducted by the UN Environment Programme also suggested organic, small-scale farming could deliver increased yields without the accompanying environmental and social damage of industrial farming. The UNEP's analysis of 114 projects in 24 African countries found that yields had more than doubled where organic, or near-organic practices had been used. In 2009 the contribution of such sustainable approaches to cooling the planet was also widely acknowledged while news of Monsanto's attempts to dress up environmentally destructive GM monocultures as climate friendly earned it a worst lobbying award.

Mainstream criticism

But what was most remarkable in 2009 was the way in which criticism of the biotech industry went mainstream. Alarmingly for the industry, some of the hardest hitting criticism it faced was to be found in editorials and investigative articles that appeared in the likes of Scientific American, the New York Times, the Associated Press and, most astonishingly of all perhaps, the staunchly pro-GM journal Nature Biotechnology.

And in different ways they were all making the same fundamental point - the GM industry has been allowed to gain an unprecedented stranglehold over the use of seeds. An editorial in Scientific American, for instance, complained that 'it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers'.

The editorial went on to note that, 'food safety and environmental protection depend on making plant products available to regular scientific scrutiny', and Scientific American called on the industry to 'immediately remove the restriction on research from their end-user agreements. Going forward, the EPA should also require, as a condition of approving the sale of new seeds, that independent researchers have unfettered access to all products currently on the market'.

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