Sowing feudalism

Biotech companies are getting so bold, shameless, dangerous and unethical that they are shuffling genes between unrelated species to manufacture drugs, infant formula, and, perhaps, human breast milk, right within the milk of cows, goats, and sheep.

They are also using the cells of corn, tobacco, soybeans and rice for the production of drugs. After all, who would suspect that essential food crops might be growing in the field for purposes other than giving us food? Can we suspect corn living a double life? Or, is it human to even imagine in our most frightened dreams that food crops would be secret factories for vaccines, contraceptives, growth hormones and other designer drugs? Or that pigs and other animals may be converted to convenient refrigerators for spare organs for humans?

Yet, according to Friends of the Earth, field trials for the production of drugs through food are going on in farms of Nebraska, Texas, Illinois, Puerto Rico, Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana, California, and Florida. And just like with the Bt corn, pollen from corn, tobacco, rice and soybeans pregnant with the genetic stuff of drugs is bound to fly in the wind, contaminating food crops and nature. In 2002, the US National Academy of Sciences warned of the hazards of this experiment in nature and society.

To criticise this immoral policy is to be branded an enemy by those selling genetic engineering in the United States.

One such a propagandist, Hembree Brandon, denounced the “anti-biotech radicals” as if they are the enemy of the state. These “anti-biotech radicals,” he wrote in the Delta Farm Press (August 30, 2002) “are a lot like Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida loonies: they want to take the world back to the Stone Age. Regardless of the consequences to humanity as a whole, they want to dictate the pace of scientific progress according to their own messianic insight into what is right for the world.”

Of course, this is nonsense. It is not the biotech critics who are taking the world to the Stone Age, but those who misuse science for personal gain.

Rachel Carson spoke about the “Stone Age of science” in order to help us understand the harm done to science by the developers and proponents of pesticides who do everything - so they keep saying - in the name of science. These people, says Carson in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, kill insects so that they control nature. They arm themselves with weapons, which are self-defeating, because each time they point them against the insects, they point them against the earth.”

We need vigorous critics and good scientists with the public good in mind to study biotechnology and give us honest answers about its effects on nature and humans. It is the immoral policies of biotech companies, which corrupt science and violate the integrity of nature, man, and civilisation. If such unethical practices continue, it is possible that humanity may plunge into the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley.

This sort of thing, cloning of animals for human spare parts, and the surreptitious use of genetic engineering to produce pharmaceutical proteins and chemicals in farmers’ fields, dubbed “biopharming,” has no place in a civilised society.

It is no longer agriculture or drug manufacturing. It is, instead, a political movement adding biological weapons to the mechanical and chemical armory of plants, broadly defined to include pharmaceutical conglomerates. It is agribusiness’ new “green revolution” (assisted by genetic engineering companies) manufactured to bury the peasant and the family farmer.

This is particularly true in the genetic engineers’ production of sterile seeds, which, should they ever reach the market, would force both the farmers and peasants to buy new seeds every growing season. This immoral technology is married to chemicals. The sown seeds will express one or more traits only with the assistance of sprays. What this means is that the farmer’s seeds will thrive or die based on the presence of a chemical, which will trigger or abort their fertility. In this way genetic engineering shows its true colors - the best friend of giant corporations and large farmers, the worst enemy of family farmers and peasants, and pure poison for nature.

This green giant of high tech (genetic engineering) will very likely stumble and fall primarily because it is an immoral intervention in agriculture, without doubt the most sacred of all life-giving traditions.