The battle for Pakistan's agriculture

The battle for Pakistan's agriculture 

by Najma Sadeque

The first battle never really took off even after 66 years - restoring unduly appropriated land to the tiller - and a second more destructive and far-reaching battle is already upon us. Monoculture killed three-fourths of global biodiversity and soils: GM can only hasten extinction.

In recent decades, the sovereignty of many countries has been undermined by the bullying impositions of corporations backed by their own governments. This extends to forcing the adoption of so-called “level playing ground” rules that cannot apply to our socio-economic and environmental conditions: fictitious “equal standing” is simply not possible between unequals.

After a long struggle, during which time the US government tried to push sanctions against the European Union if it banned or discouraged GM crops (from USA), the EU finally prevailed. And last week, financial news agencies reported on hedge funds and insider traders dumping Monsanto stock, driving prices down. That includes Monsanto’s own CEO Hugh Grant selling off 40,000 of his own company’s shares, followed by other high-level executives. Worse is expected to follow.

The reasons were the same as elsewhere - the hazards that GMOs pose to human, animal and environmental health, Monsanto’s dangerous experiments that have lead to widespread GM pollution and cancer, and its predatory business practices. No longer welcome in Europe while facing rising opposition at home, Monsanto’s last hope for market lies in developing countries such as ours, where regulation is weak.

There is an interesting similarity to Monsanto’s powers of persuasion used in USA, India and Pakistan. Monsanto has long been ‘cosy’ with US Congressmen, getting its way entirely throughout, and helpfully eased through by former Monsanto executives vaulted to government.

In India, the push to introduce Bt cotton was also engineered from top officialdom, but it was not easy. India is a huge country with many fiercely independent states, all with a strong and informed say, turning the entire farmers’ communities and public interest groups against Monsanto. While it still prevails perforce in some areas with Bt cotton, it has failed with GM food crops; and given the 200,000 farmer suicides to-date, its days seem to be numbered.

Similarly, in Pakistan, the National Biosafety Committee and other regulators are under great pressure to approve GM crops. There was quite a hue and cry in 2011 when Monsanto was exposed to have written the biotech report, which was circulated for unilateral approval without being examined in-depth. But it takes two to clap hands; the head of PARC and the Vice Chancellor of Faisalabad University had thrown their full support behind GM crops.

There are 61 federal and provincial agricultural agencies (led originally by Pakistan Agriculture Research Council (PARC) and National Agricultural Research Centre (NARC), which were devolved to the provinces in 2010. Now PARC is trying to get an extraordinary position for itself at the federal level as an umbrella organisation over all other agencies from where it will be easier to impose decisions onto the provinces. For the same reason, foreign interests such as USAID, therefore, prefer working with all-encompassing federal institutions.

This effort is remindful of the recent furore over the Farmer Assurance Provision, recently signed into law by President Barack Obama. But it had little to assure farmers with and more with boosting big agro-chemical corporations, so that it earned the title of “Monsanto Protection Act”. A provision was anonymously and secretively slipped into a resolution, as part of the Agricultural Appropriations Bill. It turned out to be a special interest loophole about which most lawmakers were unaware when they signed it. Over a quarter of million outraged US citizens then signed a petition launched by the “Food Democracy Now” network demanding the President veto it.

Why were people so angry? The provision shielded big biotech companies like Monsanto from legal action, even if a particular product proved to be harmful to humans or the environment. For the period that the provision is in place, both the Department of Agriculture and the courts are rendered powerless to stop Monsanto from producing or selling the product, no matter how toxic. The Congress actually blocked the judiciary from doing its job! According to Al-Jazeera, the provision was partly drafted by Monsanto and sneaked in through their insider friends, bypassing the necessary review from Congress' Agricultural or Judiciary Committees.

Later, the Chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Barbara Ann Mikulski, offered her apologies, claiming she did not put the offending text in and did not support it either. So, why was she so careless as to let it get through without it being discussed?

Fortunately, the provision is effective only until. By then, activists will be fighting hard to prevent it being made permanent, just as activists here will have to ensure that PARC does not become the sole decision-maker and law unto itself like the corrupted agricultural regulatory authorities in the US.

Ijaz Ahmed Rao is one such committed activist-farmer, who took it on himself to keep farmers, government decision-makers, agricultural institutions, the media and concerned citizens informed of global and local developments, good and bad, through his press writings and extensive email network - not the easiest task in an area that does not arouse strong feelings the way power politics does.

A graduate of Charles Stuart University, Australia, and a professional farmer in Bahawalpur for the last 15 years, he became interested in agro-biotechnology early on when he found his preference for organic farming difficult to pursue without government technical backup and in difficult terrain dependant on toxic river water, highly-polluted by industrial and agro-chemical runoff. He hoped to find solutions in gene technology, and initially supported the introduction of GM crops in Pakistan. But experience, controversies and data from independent sources and events since 2007 changed his mind: he concluded the technology was overhyped and MNCs were misrepresenting facts.

Between a billion and two billion rupees - all taxpayer money - is spent annually on Pakistan’s agricultural agencies to do research and related work. And though they will offer a list of impressive projects, some in collaboration with “foreign” establishments, they do not include what smallholder peasants or farmers like Ijaz Rao really need or want, such as organic farming, something they could revive with Cuba’s help, today the global leader and teacher in advanced techniques.

“Large-scale GM trials have still not been conducted in Pakistan and the process is being bulldozed so that everything is approved before the new government realises what’s really going on,” adds Rao.

Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has, reportedly, refused to give in to the GM lobby. If that’s true, stakeholders may not immediately lose the battle over Pakistan’s agriculture after all.

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Conquest by GM seed

Conquest by GM seed

by Najma Sadeque 

Is our future to be controlled by corporate government?

After all, that’s what happened in Iraq. Once Iraq was bombed to rubble and taken over, what was USA’s first step? They were prepared well in advance for imposing comprehensive hegemony. In 2004, Gen Paul Bremer, the military head of the Provisional Authority, slapped a hundred laws reducing Iraq to a vassal state sans sovereignty.

Agriculture has always been key to American foreign policy, and the most destructive of new laws concerning Iraq’s agriculture. From its birth, USA has been collecting foreign seeds – with or without host country’s permission – from wherever in the world its navy and diplomats went. Iraq falls in the ‘fertile crescent’ where wheat was first domesticated 8,000 to 13,000 years ago, and still boasted several thousand varieties of indigenous wheat. A gold mine for agricultural MNCs relying on global seed variety for fresh germplasm when their genetically-modified versions run out of steam.

The most shattering of Bremer’s laws was Order 81. It cleared the immediate import of corporate, patented, hybrid and GM seeds from the US, mainly Monsanto’s, while banning the saving of indigenous seed. That was not all. The Americans made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law. Previously plant varieties were never allowed to be patented: henceforth they could. Overnight the livelihoods of 97 percent of farmers relying on free saved seeds and inputs were destroyed. It led international researchers to condemn the deliberate annihilation of Iraq’s agriculture as the ‘ultimate war crime’.

Today, besieged by unprovoked war, Syria faces a similar threat. The Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Syria held samples of Iraq’s seeds including threatened varieties. No one knows, yet, whether they still survive or have been similarly lifted away.

Americans forget that before Thomas Jefferson became a US President, he collected and bred new seeds on his own plantation. He actually supervised drafting of the first US patent laws; they however excluded animals, plants, and other “products of nature”. The role of patents was to ensure inventors making a worthwhile living while contributing to society, not for companies to create monopolies. If a patent granting monopoly was contrary to the public interest, he said, the public interest should take precedence. This is no longer quoted.

Furthermore, biotechnology in USA was the outcome of 50 years of post-World War II research at universities and medical colleges sponsored by the federal government – that is, taxpayer-funded. Great advances and discoveries were made without any patent protections whatsoever. Later, instead of these remaining public goods, corporations were allowed to privatise them through unwarranted patents on developments paid for by taxpayers.

Since life patents began to be awarded, the free exchange of information and collaboration came to a stop, while resultant monopoly products soared in prices. Individual scientists no longer benefit from patents, but the corporations and shareholders who make fortunes from monopolies. Monsanto’s transgenic plants control extends to subsequent generations and authorises them to prevent farmers from saving their seed.

Researchers find that patents actually kill innovation as well as competition by closing up vast areas of unexplored knowledge for 20 years or more at a time. Since new patents keep being taken out overlapping similar previous ones, the monopoly in effect is ongoing and permanent.

When corporations and other interests don’t piggyback on warfare to entrench themselves, they mostly spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the White House. At any given time there are a minimum of 10,000 registered lobbyists in Washington. While the same system doesn’t exist here, lobbying is just as alive and kicking, Monsanto having been at it for over a decade. In 2006, a more responsible Agriculture Ministry in Pakistan warned that an agreement with Monsanto would bind farmers with unbearable terms and conditions. Today’s agriculture ministry is unhealthily cosy with Monsanto, and wants unilateral control over agriculture in all of Pakistan.

The US government, responding to corporate pressure, seeks to force all countries to accept US-style patent laws. For example, the US government threatened to end science and technology agreements with India, unless Indian patent laws were extended to cover pharmaceutical and agricultural products. Despite lobbying at the highest levels, Monsanto was forced out of India and Europe.

People need to realise that there are at least 80,000 edible plants on earth of which some 300 were major sources of food. Today, large-scale industrialised agriculture has led to merely 20 major crops being grown to produce 90 percent of the world’s food, although GM is useless for dryland and flood agriculture. This has destroyed biodiversity and local farmer specialisation, making corporate intervention easier controlling 75 percent or more of the world’s seeds, agro-chemicals and food. Is our future to be controlled by corporate government like the US is?

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Monsanto digs its heels in Pakistan

Genetically-modified threats

Article in Pakistan Today By Najma Sadeque

Published: June 12, 2013

Monsanto digs its heels in Pakistan

Coming from a politician or bureaucrat, it wouldn’t have been surprising. But it was unexpected from the Vice Chancellor of Faisalabad University of Agriculture when he claimed that GMOs would “bring about a new green revolution based on biotechnology, precision agriculture and climate change.” As if the first Green Revolution wasn’t bad enough! If it was for citizens’ benefit, why wasn’t Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan addressing sustainable farmers and concerned citizens, instead of briefing diplomats from 24 countries? That fit more into loaded trade and investment talks, not a country’s delicate agricultural security.

Dr Khan offers no evidence based on local research whatsoever to prove that GMOs are “a great and safe invention that would enhance crop productivity”. He seems oblivious of the fact that even GM seed-producing corporations don’t make that claim.

“Where is the independent data which shows that GM Corn would increase average yield?” demands Ijaz Ahmed Rao, professional farmer, graduated from Australia, “Data from USDA clearly shows that despite GM technologies (Insect-resistant (Bt), Herbicide-tolerant, Stacked gene varieties), yields in USA have not increased since 1987!”

Rao sounds an alarm the government must note – that Pakistan’s corn exports to Europe and elsewhere would be seriously affected as they import non-GM corn and corn products from Pakistan at premium rates and on bases of certification. Far from boosting Pakistan’s output and earnings, Bt corn would be the ideal weapon to destroy our exports to Europe which recently banned Monsanto and other GMOs, with ongoing plans to wipe them out completely.

Similarly, sans evidence, Dr Khan claims that Bt (GM) cotton increased productivity while pesticide-application was reduced in Pakistan. Strange indeed, when in the rest of the world – including USA, the heaviest GM user – it rapidly lost resistance to pests and required increasing amounts of pesticides, now multiplied several-fold.

He disregards India’s terrible 15-year experience with Monsanto’s Bt cotton that, with Monsanto’s overpriced products and unfair practices, led to over 300,000 suicides since 1995, making India the world’s farmers’ suicide centre. Should we be joining their ranks?

Indeed, Dr Khan ignores Monsanto’s long and ignominious history around the world – originally a chemical corporation that co-supplied 19 million gallons of herbicide to defoliate Vietnam’s forests and crops on 4.5 million acres over 11 years, killing or maiming 400,000, causing half a million deformed children born, helpless and dependant for life, and two million cancer cases. After diverse other ventures, Monsanto got into GM seeds which are ‘successful’ only if Monsanto’s accompanying poisonous chemicals are heavily sprayed.

While appearing to promote Monsanto’s planned launch of ‘Herbicide Resistance Corn’, Dr Khan was blind to the dangerous ground he was treading on. Chemically-grown food crops have already lost nutritive value and led to malnutrition, in both South countries and USA.

Because it wasn’t reported here, the VC probably doesn’t know that on May 25, over two million participants in 436 cities across 52 countries, protested against Monsanto, demanding it gets out from everywhere. This, apart from the long-standing, ongoing “Millions against Monsanto” campaign that informs and brings together concerned citizens and activists globally.

Or that the Carnival of Corn in Mexico City coincided with and joined the global protest. Mexico was the cradle of corn boasting thousands of corn varieties; it needed no more, let alone GM corn, from outside. But their own president sold his country out to Monsanto and other GM corporations, just as Bush and Obama did the same to their people. In country after country, it was not the merit of the product but officials that succumbed to tempting lures.

And last week Japan and South Korea cancelled huge contracts for US wheat when it was revealed Monsanto’s unapproved GM seeds had contaminated vast farmlands in USA.

Monsanto dug in its heels in Pakistan over a decade ago since Musharraf’s time. The General probably didn’t understand agriculture which may have made it easy to sway him. His regime unilaterally sanctioned corporate farming, which is increasingly pursued with GM seeds. The timing was significant.

When Musharraf’s rule ended, the PPP government dealt an unexpected shock when Mr. Gilani’s very first speech as prime minister ended with the incongruous announcement – having nothing to do with his political statements – that they had decided to let Monsanto in. Clearly, political changes did not undo special interests. Since then, ceaseless crises in Pakistan have kept attention diverted from Monsanto activities in Pakistan.

Dr Khan should remember the ‘Precautionary Principle’ – unless he’s excluded ecology from agriculture – and investigate the extent of unchecked contamination in Pakistan. GM monoculture threatens to wipe out what’s left of our biodiversity without which even GM can’t continue, will further chemical-drench and kill our deteriorating farmlands, while he risks being remembered among the short-sighted responsible for near-extinction of species.

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