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TechnoratiZURICH - Like many stores in Europe, the Coop chain of supermarkets in Switzerland does not specify whether goods are genetically modified - because none are. But a wave of food-price inflation may help wash away popular opposition to so-called Frankenstein foods.
"I think there's a lot of resistance in Switzerland," said a shopper, Beatrice Hochuli, as she picked out a salad for dinner at a bustling supermarket outside the main Zurich station. "Most people in Switzerland are quite against it."
Consumers, even those from relatively wealthy parts of the world, are rarely first in line to adopt new technologies. Although food prices are up more than 50 percent since May 2006, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index, Europeans remain wary of foods derived from tinkering with the genetic makeup of plants.
But policy makers and food companies are pressing the genetic modification topic in a bid to temper aversion to biotech crops like pesticide-resistant rapeseed for oils and "Roundup-ready" soybeans, which tolerate dousing of the Roundup herbicide.
These are crops already common in the United States and other major food exporters like Argentina and Brazil.
The European Commission has said that it believes biotech crops can alleviate the current crisis in food supply, although it added in June that expediency should not overrule strict scientific scrutiny of the use of the technology involved.
The chairman of Nestlé, the world's biggest food group, has said it is impossible to feed the world without genetically modified organisms.
Meanwhile, the British government's former chief scientific adviser, David King, has said over the past week that genetically modified crops hold the key to solving the world's food crisis. He called in a Financial Times interview for a "third green revolution," in reference to two waves of innovation that helped increase crop yields sharply in Asia over the past 50 years.
Climate change and increasing concern about fresh water supplies are helping to fuel interest in new seed varieties likely to be more resistant to drought and able to produce reasonable yields with significantly less water. GM technology still has many opponents, who fear that genetically modified crops can create health problems for animals and humans, wreak havoc on the environment, and give far-reaching control over the world's food to a few corporate masters.
Yet a European Commission-sponsored opinion poll last month showed slight change in awareness and acceptance of the technology.
"For me it is just a matter of time before we get our head around GM," said Jonathan Banks at the market information company AC Nielsen. "The way people will learn to live with GM is to say 'we do it product by product and make sure everything is OK,"' Banks said. "At the moment we have a knee-jerk reaction which thinks of Frankenstein foods."
The European Union has not approved any genetically modified crops for a decade, and the Union's 27 member countries often clash on the issue. Outside the EU, Switzerland has a moratorium on growing GM crops, though that authorities have granted permission for three GM crop trials between 2008 and 2010 for research.
The market represents a substantial opportunity for biotechnology companies: the European seeds market is worth $7.9 billion, out of a global total of $32.7 billion, according to data from Cropnosis, a consultancy. The global genetically modified seeds market was worth $6.9 billion in 2007 and is set to grow further.
Agrochemical companies are riding a wave of high food prices and soaring demand for farm goods, and Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta have all raised 2008 earnings forecasts. Although high prices are a boon for farm suppliers, much of the cost has been passed on to consumers, sparking protests in many countries including Argentina, Indonesia and Mexico.
Others also see opportunity: in June, the chocolate maker Mars, the computer giant IBM and the U.S. Department of Agriculture said they would map the DNA of the cocoa tree to try to broaden the crop's $5 billion market.
In a Eurobarometer opinion poll in March, the number of European respondents saying they lacked information on genetically modified food fell to 26 percent, compared with 40 percent in the previous survey, which took place in 2005.
But 58 percent were apprehensive about the use of such crop technology and just 21 percent were in favor, down from 26 percent in a 2006 Eurobarometer survey on biotechnology.
"People do change attitudes, just gradually, because they become used to technologies," said Jonathan Ramsay, spokesman for Monsanto, the world's biggest seed company. "Consumers are looking at prices, consumers hear the stories about food production, growing population in the world, and I think people do understand that agriculture needs to be efficient."
Friedrich Berschauer, chief executive of the world's fourth-biggest seed producer, Bayer CropScience, believes that acceptance of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, will be gradual.
"Long-term, I am certain that GMOs will be accepted," Berschauer said. "But I dare not give a forecast whether that will be in 5 years or in 10."
But critics of genetic modification say that the technology does not bring the benefits promised. A recent report by the organic group Soil Association concluded that yields of all major GM varieties are equivalent to or less than those from conventional crops.
"GM chemical companies constantly claim they have the answer to world hunger while selling products which have never led to overall increases in production," said Peter Melchett, Soil Association's policy director, "and which have sometimes decreased yields or even led to crop failure."
Geert Ritsema, a genetic engineering campaigner at Greenpeace International, said that proponents of biotech crops are using high market prices to scare consumers into thinking that their food will become too expensive unless they turn to GM technology.
More awareness of the technology could also reinforce wariness, said Jean Halloran, head of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union.
"I think that if consumers become really educated," she said, "that's the point they'll end up at and say, 'Why should I mess around with this technology when it has no benefits to me?"'
Copyright © 2008 The International Herald Tribune
20 Comments so far
Show AllDoes anyone question that the US intends to control the world? The deed will be done when everyone has to buy their seeds from Monsanto. Who controls the food, controls the people.
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dkm: "...they need to step out of the way so people who honestly care about keeping people fed can go about their business of doing just that."
The fundamental problem is that the people who for milenia have practiced "turn the world into food and kill anything that gets in the way" have run into the limiting factor of the carrying capacity of the earth. Producing more and more food, which produces more and more people, is a losing proposition. Children losing sight because of a vitamin deficiency sounds like a problem that could be solved by growing more food, but in what used to be the long run but is quickly becoming the short run, producing more food is not and cannot be the solution; it is in fact the problem.
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In any case, GM food (what is "GWOT", by the way?) is a terrible attempt at growing more food. It is always accompanied by other high-tech, high-finance methods that leave people in worse condition than before. Witness Haiti, which used to produce its own rice, which now imports rice from the US at the new unaffordable prices, a situation caused by World Bank neoliberal policies. Organic farming practices at a local level, with its greatly reduced dependence on petroleum, poisons, and international financiers, is a much better way to go.
www.hemowai.tv
The people fighting GM food are the same people who think that there can be a GWOT. It isn't the technique itself that is a real problem. If a problem exists, it will be the particular gene or genes inserted into the genome. In the meantime they need to step out of the way so people who honestly care about keeping people fed can go about their business of doing just that. Otherwise they sound like Georgie-boy and his talk about Global Warming.
There are thousands of Asian children who have lost their sight due to vit A deficiency that could have been prevented if the Luddites hadn't kept golden rice off the market. There are other benefits that are occurring, the improved protein digestibility of alfalfa, a major forage, for example, even though they are unaware of it and would stop it if they could.
When we posted links to "The World According to Monsanto," it was quickly taken off the net, but it was an hour-and-a-half horror story that makes Freddy Krueger seem like a pussycat. It is all greed and manipulation and the literal and figurative death of small farmers and small farms.
You can't save the seeds, and the royalties on the crops takes the profit away from the farmer and gives it to the Corporation. In India, cottom farmers are killing themselves because they can no longer even pay their debts. Monsanto gets it.
They plant in areas just to destroy the biodiversity. If you can find a working link to it, watch it. Again, "The World According to Monsanto."
Sorry. Accidentally posted twice.
FredWol says: Tip: 20% of the world’s people using 90% of the resources is not a part of a fair or humane solution.
rtdrury says: The people of the world can feed themselves, without any synthetic inputs, so long as they maintain land, water and food rights, to secure their independence from the beast capital.
Right on. The hunger problem isn't for lack of food; it's for lack of food rights and rights over local economies. Free trade agreements such as NAFTA heavily subsidize agribusiness corporations so that crops are shipped to developing countries and sold below the cost of production. This puts poor family farmers who can't compete out of business. In Africa entire silos of grain sit and rot, because cheap grain from the States (USAID, ironically) is flooding and devastating their economy.
Another problem is that land is used to grow luxury products for overseas wealthy consumers (cocoa and coffee) instead of food staple products for local poor people who need to eat. Corporations own and run the land; not the local people who need to be in control of their lives. In other places, like Mexico, fishermen and farmers who have supported themselves for decades are being displaced to set up luxury hotel resorts for tourists. What happens to these displaced people? They migrate north to work in sweatshops or try to enter the U.S. Many of them wind up working on huge factory farms in the U.S., where they are exposed to pesticide chemicals all day, receive below-poverty wages, and have no labor rights. The economy is set up so a few heavily profit, while the majority provide cheap labor and starve.
GM foods will not solve this problem. This is PR BS. The only thing that will solve this is fair land and resource rights for those who live and work the land, and fair trade. Small farming families and communities should run their own farms and be given priority.
GM plants cannot replace the requirements for climate, water, good soil, and the requirements for genetic diversity for local adaption, grown and naturally or farmer selected locally, as nature has managed to do so far. Also dependence on costly oil derived products for fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides is going to put a spike in the progress of GM so far. Show me a GM product that does not depend on more oil based agricultural products and allows the inter generational growth and admixture with locally adapted species. The GM marketing model is unnatural and locally unsustainable, therefore a very artificial thing. When GM becomes a local technique applied only locally by trial and error, crossbreeding and selection, with no patents and free sharing of useful traits, thats when it might help. Wait, thats what we already have, before Monsanto and GM. The global profit motive spoils local development.
GM crops banned in Switzerland until 2012
The Swiss Federal Council (government) has voted to extend the country’s moratorium on genetically modified (GM) plants for a further three years beyond the current expiry date of November 2010, Dow Jones reports.
http://www.allaboutfeed.net/news/id102-50901/gm_crops_banned_in_switzerl...
The people of the world can feed themselves, without any synthetic inputs, so long as they maintain land, water and food rights, to secure their independence from the beast capital.
In fact, GM food does not increase yields in the long run.
They are also more vulnerable to diseases and pests, and thus 'require' the use of more herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers. This ruins the soil: it increases erosion, depletes topsoil, and pollutes the water table.
The pesticides, fertilizers, etc. involve the use of a LOT of fossil fuels.
GM crops: NOT a solution to ANYTHING. And a big, big problem.
This reads like a morality play. Big Food switches to oil and jacks up food prices creating a crisis. Then it demands that everyone give into GM technology, which it just happens to control, to save those poor people it starved when it decided to grow foodstuffs to turn into biofuel. And the next thing? Oh, not much. Just acre upon acre of monocultures, patents owned by Big Food, naturally. And when the next plague or infection or infestation turns up and wipes out the monoculture? What then will the starving have to turn to?
John Christopher foresaw this. Read the "Death of Grass" for a vision of that future.
I wonder why they pictured boxes of tomatoes. If there is one plant that does NOT need modifying to make it grow better, this is it. Their seeds can pass through your digestive system and still grow. Each plant produces so much fruit that you can let the bugs have half, and still have too many.
But don't expect the seeds from bought tomatoes to grow. They will not if they are not vine ripened, but picked when green (which is also the reason they have little taste).
Same applies for strawberries -- all of it.
How is it that as we have grown more GM crops, food has become more scarce and more expensive, yet people still believe that GM crops are the answer?
Craig Mackintosh wrote a comprehensive backgrounder on the food crisis a few months ago - http://www.celsias.com/article/the-food-crisis-misery-is-profitable/ which includes a critical look at GMOs. We have covered the GMO issue from a number of angles at Celsias. You can get to some of the articles from here http://www.celsias.com/articles/business-technology/genetic-modification...
Even if were true, and it appears to not be true, that GM foods increased food production; what IS true is that increasing food production is not a solution to the food crisis. The Green Revolution apparently produced more food but the result of it was that there are now many more people who need to be fed. That's because, if food supply is increased, poplulation will increase, an elemental truth for any biological system.
The world is already supporting more people than is sustainable. Thousands of species disappear each year so that humans can multiply, and humans are destroying the sustainability of the planet in many other ways.
On the other hand, if food supply is kept constant, the number of humans will stay more or less the same, the number being born roughly equalling the number dying. Whether the overall process occurs fairly and humanely or not is something we can control by ensuring that the existing food and other resources are shared. If we could accomplish that, then the next proper step would be to work on decreasing the number of people on the planet in a fair and humane manner, so that sustainability could be re-established.
Tip: 20% of the world's people using 90% of the resources is not a part of a fair or humane solution.
Funny how they interview CEOs of GMO corporations for "expert" opinions, while claiming that peer-reviewed scientific research that disproves claims to higher yields or any improvement in food quality from GMO "foods" comes only from "critics." Corporate propaganda, anyone? Pathetic!
Right, cygnusx1lisahole. Here's Naomi Klein's latest description of the "Shock Doctrine" in action:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080721/lookout
“Long-term, I am certain that GMOs will be accepted,†Berschauer said. “But I dare not give a forecast whether that will be in 5 years or in 10.â€
MY PREDICTION: The future generations of Berschauer's will feel the shame of being related to the CEO of a company who put profits before humanity, health and the food chain and unleashed unimaginable hunger and disease on the world.
More "Shock Doctrine" Economics.
I beg the Europeans to keep fighting GM food with all their strength.
Gee this food shortage couldn't have been manipulated and planned in order to put a more positive spin on GMO's could it?