
Michelle Obama puts herself at the mercy of an "External Locus of Power"...
Bite me: global newswire Reuters’ third most-read story at the moment is a long feature on the debate over agricultural production titled “The Fight Over the Future of Food“. It’s a topical issue, no doubt.
Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and UK climate change advisor ensured it got even more attention when he told everyone to give up eating meat last month, claiming:
Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.
The old hippy: you can be as Stern as you like, M’lud, you won’t tear me away from my bacon and eggs…
But Reuter’s piece, for all its topicality and apparent attempt to provide “balance” through comparing and contrasting — like some undergrad essay — organic and biotech approaches to increasing food production, smells a little funny. It starts with the lead:
Giuseppe Oglio’s farm near Milan looks like it’s suffering from neglect. Weeds run rampant amid the rice fields and clover grows unchecked around his millet crop….
… Nearly 5,000 miles away, in laboratories in St. Louis, Missouri, hundreds of scientists at the world’s biggest seed company, Monsanto, also want to feed the world, only their tools of choice are laser beams and petri dishes.
While this may be a mere literary device for the sake of an eye-catching juxtaposition, note the derogatory choice of adjectives for the organic farmer from the very off: “unchecked”, “rampant”, “neglect” and the choice of instruments — lasers, petri dishes — that epitomise scientific neutrality for Monsanto.
This supposed division between submission to the essential anarchy of nature (letting weeds run rampant) and the innovative scientists working around the clock to feed the hungry seems to be becoming — if you’ll excuse the pun — a staple of the debate between “conventional” and “organic” farming method. A few examples:
An article in Farmer’s Weekly entitled “Take Charge of your own Destiny” in which author Matthew Naylor posits a division between conventional farmers who have an ‘Internal Locus of Control’ and take charge of their own destiny and “hippies” who believe in an ‘External Locus of Power’ and put themselves at the mercy of fate.
Dr. Matt Ridley, who in his laughable essay “Genetically modified crops and the perils of rejecting innovation” written for the Policy Exchange think tank claims that “Nostalgic urban dwellers would prefer farmers to leave fields fallow, to grow oats for horses, to tolerate cornflowers in wheat and bees in clover, and not to pollute streams with nitrate run-off.” (A straw man if ever there was one; and would Ridley prefer to pollute streams then?)
I’ll return to point out briefly what a false dichotomy Ridley, Naylor and now Reuters are positing, but first things first, that whole Monsanto petri dish thing…

Photo courtesy of Nic Ut. Agent Orange courtesy of Monsanto.
Lets get one thing crystal clear from the offset: there is nothing remotely detached, scientifically neutral or altruistic about Monsanto; in fact its track record shows it is dedicated, essentially, to destruction.
It was heavily involved in the Manhatten Project to create the first atomic bomb; it manufactured the Agent Orange used extensively throughout the Vietnam War (that iconic picture of the little naked, napalmed girl running down the street? Thanks in part to a Monsanto product) and it now provides DynCorp with Round Up Ultra to spray on the rainforests of Colombia, killing coca plants but also Ecuadorian children. Feel the love.
“Want to feed the world” and “the petri dish” indeed… What utter bullshit. (For more comprehensive, less polemical background on Monsanto’s Machiavellian ways on everything from PCBs to Dioxins and GM Cotton, check out Crocodyl’s page on them here.)
To return to Reuters’ article: Whilst I don’t have time to deconstruct it paragraph by paragraph, along with the points I’ve noted above, a few examples of a narrative that is superficial at best, mendacious at worst stand out:
Affluent consumers may prefer the Oglios of the world to the Monsantos, but their skittishness about high-tech agriculture is making it more difficult to grapple with the mounting crisis over the lack of food.
This is (or should be) a debate about the long-term efficacy of agricultural production and its broader knock-on effect on the biosphere, not the “skittishness” of affluent customers, which is another straw man and utterly irrelevant. It is not a handful of a few rich consumers who are hampering the ability of scientists to grapple with the food crisis Monsanto to maximise it’s profits (would that the simple consumer were that powerful) but legitimate concerns about the threat posed by GMOs to biodiversity and the ability of farmers to have control of their own seed supply.
Meanwhile, neglected by Reuters, there is a growing consensus in the scientific community that industrial agricultural production has wreaked havoc on soil quality and must be curtailed or vitiated with organic/non traditional methods before further damage is done and yields drop significantly.

Drought in the central India state of Madhya Pradesh
The authors of the article turn to India:
India sorely needs another Green Revolution,” said Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, joint managing director of Bajaj Hinduthan, India’s top sugar producer, which is importing raw sugar after a drought hit the domestic cane crop. But a second green revolution would face a strong counterinsurgency, even in a place like India that benefited so profoundly from the first one…
India’s Green Revolution is actually on the verge of collapse as water tables drop massively, pests increase resistance to herbicides and the amount of fertiliser they need triples as soil quality drops. As National Public Radio reported in April this year:
[Farmers] gathered on a recent morning in a stone-paved courtyard to explain why the famed “bread basket” of India is heading toward collapse. Their comparatively small region, Punjab, grows far more wheat and rice for India than any other region.
But now these farmers are running out of groundwater. They have to buy three times as much fertilizer as they did 30 years ago to grow the same amount of crops. They blitz their crops with pesticides, but insects have become so resistant that they still often destroy large portions of crops.
“That benefited so profoundly from the first one”? That’s a little unbalanced then, isn’t it? The authors also go on to claim that “India has so far allowed GM seeds only for cotton, which has boosted productivity”. Well… if you’re a Monsanto researcher, that’s what you claim anyway.
Bt Cotton can actually be argued to have been a major fuck-up and has attracted considerable controversy in India, with some blaming the debt incurred by farmers from buying the seed for a spate of suicides. As Crocodyl’s backgrounder notes:
Farmers around the world have experienced problems with Monsanto’s Bt cotton. Researchers from Cornell University reported in July 2006 that Chinese GM cotton farmers are losing money due to ’secondary’ pests: “After seven years, populations of other insects — such as mirids — have increased so much that farmers are now having to spray their crops up to 20 times a growing season to control them, according to the study of 481 Chinese farmers in five major cotton-producing provinces.”
In India, Bt cotton is prohibited in Kerala and Orissa. After crop failures were reported in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the Genetic Engineering Approvals Committee (GEAC) refused to renew the company’s license for 3 varieties. In addition, the office of director general of investigation and registration (DGIR) submitted a preliminary investigation report to the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practicies Commission on March 29, 2006 charging Monsanto for setting unreasonably high rates for Bt cotton.
Just three examples plucked at random after a very cursory read of the article, but enough to convince me that it is framing the debate in an entirely unsatisfactory way. The reporters, by setting the parameters of a discussion and giving the illusion of balance by weighing up two approaches, in actual fact are serving to neutralise the broader debate; for if we are going to talk dichotomies, the “fight” for the future of food is more one between people and profit than Monsanto and the weeds.
Just for the record, Thomson Reuters’ CEO is also a director of Merck Co., a pharmaceutical major that has been actively seeking out biotech acquisitions… food for thought, no? While he would no-doubt never interfere in the editorial process of a reputable newswire, one wonders if a more cogent critique of the biotech industry would find its way into print at the firm given the above fact…

Monsanto: feeding the poor and hungry... napalm.