Letters

Terminating Peasant Farmers

The article in The Ecologist Vol. 28 No. 5 'The Monsanto Files', entitled "Terminator Technology" by R,A. Steinbrecher and P.A. Mooney points out the cost to peasant farmers of buying new seed every year and herbicides or pesticides like RoundUp, saying "The target market for the Terminator is explicitly the South's farmers."

For reason of these expenses I can't see that genetically-engineered crops would be taken up by peasant farmers. Over the decades, there has been a long litany of failed attempts to bring technological solutions to peasant farmers in the Third World. A book published way back in 1985, "Famine, a Man-made Disaster" (Pan), now, in the light of biotechnology, looks prescient. It says:

"First the colonial authorities, then local urban elites, and aid agencies alike have assumed that peasant farming methods were downright inefficient and that their unwillingness to adopt new technologies was a mark of their ignorance. Such judgements did not look at the innovations from the point of view of the peasant. A high-yielding variety of maize requires fertiliser, pesticides and water. With a limited amount to invest, a poor peasant cannot afford the risk of going into debt to buy the seed and then not being able to pay the debt back when the crop fails for lack of fertiliser or pesticide. Building on peasant knowledge and needs requires a participatory approach and a willingness to rough it in the field. Too many scientists prefer their laboratories."

Biotechnology is more likely to get taken up by the owners of vast areas of the land, which they can afford to hold on to only by growing cash crops on it. An article in New Scientist of 31 October 1998 (p.50) mentions as an instance Brazil, where "famine is perennial." It tells of a case where Monsanto in September

"announced it would invest $550 million in Brazil to build a factory producing RoundUp. Shortly afterwards, the Brazilian government made Monsanto's RoundUp-resistant soya beans the country's first legally approved genetically engineered crop. The soya beans will boost the profits for the big landowners who grow them to feed beef cattle for export. But most rural Brazilians are subsistence farmers who do not grow soya."

Maybe this is why biotechnology companies, who say they are motivated by compassion for Third World hunger, do not speak out for redistributing the land, only saying: "Biotechnology will help increase the yield on limited land," (Europa Bio Literature - the Association of European Biotechnology Companies). Maybe it is because their interest lies in selling to the big landowners?

Mark Kinzley, Ilford, Essex. UK.

Stabilising the Climate Means Stabilising Population

The Ecologist's Declaration on Climate Change is bold and cogent and deserves to be taken seriously. Curiously, however, one factor that is all-important was not to be found in this declaration: population stabilisation. Consider this passage from the 1992 Scientists' Warning to Humanity:

"Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future"

That sounds like a lynch pin to me, plain and simple, and over 1,700 top scientists were willing to sign on to that premise. So why the oversight in The Ecologist's Declaration?

If you are planning to do a special issue on population with its own declaration (kind of like how the Population Summit in Cairo was held apart from the Rio summit), then my concerns are out of place, and I apologise. If however, population control was dropped from the declaration because of expediency (=duplicity?) the result was to render the piece virtually hollow.

Lief Joslyn, Kensington, CA 94707, USA.

Simon Retallack replies: The central purpose of The Ecologist's Declaration on Climate Change is to alert people to the urgency of the need to abandon the use of fossil fuels and to protect our precious forests and ocean sinks. Whilst the lack of restraining population growth might figure as part of any attempt to achieve these goals, given the unusual length of our special edition on climate change, there was insufficient space left to tackle the subject of population in sufficient depth. You can be assured, therefore, that the omission was not the result of any duplicity! Population is clearly a significant issue - one that The Ecologist has addressed in the past and will again in the future.

Taking Precautions

Having recently come across a copy of your (previously unknown to me, but quite excellent) magazine, entitled "The Monsanto Files", (which I am recommending to any of my friends who are interested in finding out what the current GM furore is really all about) I was shocked, though perhaps unsurprised, to learn of the complicity between the US government and the Monsanto Corporation. The article "Revolving Doors: Monsanto and the Regulators" was an unpleasant confirmation of a suspicion I have held for some years, and which your magazine's journalism seems to confirm: that governments today, whatever their stripes, are generally in the pockets of industry.

Perhaps some would say that, in the USA at least, such an observation is scarcely groundbreaking. But I wonder if such a similarly close relationship exists in Britain? I have been struck recently by the contrast between the Blair government's very different stance over two food safety issues.

Your readers may remember that over a year ago the government banned the sale of beef-on-the-bone, having received scientific advice that there may have been a very small risk of CJD being transmitted to anybody eating it. Attacked by the public, the government defended itself by citing the importance of the 'precautionary principle' in matters of public health.

Yet today, with untested GM foods flooding our shelves, and scientists and even doctors expressing concern about the dangers of these new foods, we hear not a word from Mr Blair or Mr Jack Cunningham about that 'precautionary principle.' Could this disparity, I wonder, have anything to do with the power, influence and money-making potential of the biotechnology industry?

Peter Kane, High Wycombe, UK.