frosty
10-08-2006, 06:22 PM
Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference.
Melbourne, AU. 6-9 August 2006
Scott Kinnear - Speech for Organic
Introduction about Myself
Firstly I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land,
whose ancestors have performed ceremonies and rituals here for thousands
of years.
Today I represent GeneEthics Network and the Biological Farmers of
Australia. GeneEthics Network and Greenpeace supporters were outside
handing out flyers when you came in on Monday and staged a sustainable
food fiesta in the park opposite at lunch time.
I understand you were told on the opening day to pay no attention to
these concerned citizens outside. But these are the interested public
who care most about food that you must convince if you want to sell your
genetically engineered products. My colleagues and friends were locked
out, and my presence here is no more than a token concession by the
organisers.
Perhaps you will also obey Ausbiotech and the Bracks Government as the
major sponsor of the conference in this session today and pay no
attention to what I have to say either.
I am a father of four teenagers, employ thirty people in my organic
retail businesses and have a degree in agricultural science majoring in
biochemistry. After I finished fourth year I was invited to a
professor's office and offered the opportunity to do a PhD in
biochemistry at the Australian National University. I ran out of that
office and have not stopped running since.
I represent a body of people who seek to make agriculture and the food
supply genuinely sustainable and healthy, for this and future
generations. We also oppose the corporate control of global resources by
just 500 transnational food production and processing companies that are
rapidly consuming the world.
Ag Biotech and genetic engineering are central to that paradigm, made
possible by a 5/4 ruling of the US Supreme Court in 1980 - the famous
Diamond versus Chakrabarty case - that allowed the patenting of
genetically engineered organisms. Coupled with corporations being
granted the same legal rights as natural persons, the stage has been set
for attempted corporate control of all life support systems on this
planet.
Question 1 asserts that Advances in agricultural biotechnology over the
last 10 years have been good for the environment.
My answer is unequivocally, NO, they have not!
I draw your attention to the structure of the program of this conference
- more than 60 speakers and only one dissenting voice. Even as the one
dissenter, it was not until the 21st July 06 that I was asked, which
seems like a token afterthought to me. Delving deeper into the program I
find that there are 2430 minutes of sessions, both plenary and breakout.
My 12 minutes equates to 0.4938 % of the conference time - approximately
one two hundredth of the program.
So how do I feel about yet another public relations talkfest, so full of
spin and silver bullets that I nearly did not bother to turn up today? I
remain an idealist and am always hopeful that perhaps somewhere amongst
the people who choose to listen, I will make a small connection. Perhaps
I will raise an awareness of the injustice inherent in the bias of this
program. I am particularly disappointed in the shameful way that, yet
again, feeding the 850 million starving people in the world is again
being used in the media by conference participants to guilt trip the
Australian public and policy-makers into accepting your technology and
its products. Present food production is sufficient to adequately feed
12 billion people yet agricultural subsidies for first world farmers,
poverty, unemployment and social upheaval deny the malnourished and
starving their basic human rights. GE crops cannot solve these
inequities.
Greenpeace wrote about the ABIC conference as follows:
"Melbourne is currently crawling with genetic engineering advocates,
in town for the annual Agricultural Biotechnology International
Conference (ABIC). And, with the predictability of clockwork, the tired
old lines about genetically engineered crops feeding the world are
getting dragged out from the conference propagandists. Dr Ganesh
Khishoor was supposed to be the impartial voice of the conference on ABC
radio's Bush Telegraph.
He spoke about how biotech must be accepted in countries like the US and
Europe, before work is done to benefit poorer countries. But this is the
same Dr Ganesh Khishoor who developed GE canola for Monsanto, and chief
biotechnology officer for Dupont. More than a slight vested interest
there."
But where is biotech going? Another look at the program reveals a
session with the title:
"Treating our Planet as Patient: Biotech Foods as Global
Medicine".
The arrogance of the authors of this session title beggars belief.
Surely most of you don't believe this new and innovative PR spin to
sit alongside "feeding the world". Another interpretation of
this title may be, "We are aiming to make all food crops on the face
of the planet genetically engineered ". What will be the social and
environmental implications of that future?
Question 2. The regulation of agricultural biotechnology adequately
addresses the risks.
My answer, NO it does not!
Scanning the conference document, I looked for the token session on risk
identification and management for Ag Biotech. Using the search function
the word `risk' appears but only once. This is the sentence:
"How do we get the average person to understand risk?"
This sentence appears in the intro for this session and is pretty
insulting since you locked the average people out of your conference
with a price tag of $500 a day. The risk to the personal safety and well
being of people is central to why genetic engineering (and Agricultural
Gene technology) is stalled. Clearly risk assessment and management is
not high on the agricultural gene tech agenda and this will further fuel
food buyer rejection.
You will see from the leaflet I hold here that you are welcome to pick
up after this session, that the bans on GE canola in Australia are fully
justified by the $65 per tonne premium which our farmers are presently
receiving from European buyers – a market that North American
growers had and have lost!!
I read with interest Prof Jennifer Thomson's opinion piece in The
Australian newspaper on Monday of this week. She addressed the risk
issue as follows:
"How safe is food derived from GM crops? Listen to Craig Venter, a
scientist who led the team that sequenced the human genome. No food
crop, he insists, has ever been tested for human safety as rigorously as
GM food crops. Indeed, in contrast, many conventional food crops can be
extremely toxic."
This is yet another example of a scientist speaking from on high outside
the province of their professional expertise. I do not accept the
opinions of a molecular biologist in relation to the safety of GM food
crops. I have spent a considerable amount of time listening to and
talking with Dr Judy Carman in Australia, a public health epidemiologist
and accept her views. The public are able to understand the difference
in expertise between these two people and heed Judy's well-founded
warnings. Hardening of resistance to GE foods and crops should be no
surprise to anyone. It is not the result of scaremongering as the GE
industry claims (ignoring its own scares about `feeding the
world')
Our federal regulators do not apply scientific criteria to assess the
risks of genetically engineered products. Nor are the applicants for a
licence required to submit robust, peer-reviewed scientific data that
can be objectively evaluated by the regulators and the public. Much of
the shonky data that is submitted remains commercially secret.
Confidence in regulation founders right here.
Gene Technology Regulation is based on the same flawed system of
chemical regulation. This is not surprising, given that the world's
largest chemical companies are heavily into agricultural gene
technology. Even a pallet of mostly unpublished and NOT peer-reviewed
studies accompanying an application inspires no confidence in the
system. Locking much of this data away shouting commercial in confidence
is equally uninspiring. Many of you people are responsible for the
greatest experiment on our health and the environment and you are not
held accountable.
How many times have I heard many of you say, "300 million Americans
have been eating GM foods for years with no peer reviewed and published
evidence of harm." But hold on. GM foods are not labelled in the US,
there is no health-monitoring program, there are no human feeding trials
to try and identify impacts, symptoms to look for etc. As Judy Carman
says, "Looking for the link between a significant jump in public
disease and a GE food is like looking for a needle in a haystack."
Question 3. Organic agriculture and GM crops are mutually exclusive.
My answer, YES they are.
And what do people increasingly want? By choice it is NOT biotech foods
grown by corporations in massive high input dependant monocultures
tended by machines rather than people.
Awareness is rapidly growing of the corporatisation, globalisation and
industrialisation of our food supply. In response people all over the
world are seeking out organic and biodynamic food. They are buying from
box schemes, farmers markets, specialist stores and are reconnecting to
the meaning of food. Food is health, food is warmth, food is family,
food is friends and food is, dare I say it, love. How can the biotech
world compete with that.
The further we go down the path towards insanity as a species, the more
we want to pump out all the oil, dig up all the coal and uranium, cut
down our forests and own life itself, the more the human spirit will
rebel against this.
I don't know what you really feel in your heart of hearts. Is this
just a job, are you doing it to get rich, are you driven by dreams of
truly saving the world, do you have a mortgage and this is your training
and you do not know what else to do. Well if you do feel uncomfortable
then you have a duty of care to speak out. If you do not want to do so
publicly and have concerns, then voice them privately to people with
influence. You may have information that can assist myself, Bob Phelps
or others to bring public focus to your concerns without revealing
yourself. There are eminent scientists who are saying that we are
looking down the barrel of eco-system collapse within 30 to 50 years. We
do not have much time to return to a sustainable system of agriculture.
I am convinced that agricultural biotech is completely the wrong
direction and that we need to turn the titanic around fast.
And to come back to the arguments put forward by Prof Thomson from
Africa in her opinion piece in The Australian. To quote Nobel Peace
Prize winner Wangari Mathai, Coordinator, The Green Belt Movement,
Nairobi, Kenya.
"History has many records of crimes against humanity, which were
also justified by dominant commercial interests and governments of the
day. Despite protests from citizens, social justice for the common good
was eroded in favour of private profits. Today, patenting of life forms
and the genetic engineering which it stimulates, is being justified on
the grounds that it will benefit society, especially the poor, by
providing better and more food and medicine. But in fact, by
monopolising the 'raw' biological materials, the development of other
options is deliberately blocked. Farmers therefore, become totally
dependent on the corporations for seeds. Market monopolies create
pricing structures which make biotech products inaccessible to the poor,
in whose name they are promoted. In fact the poor cannot access these
markets. Instead they are persuaded, coerced and sometimes forced, to
grow cash crops like coffee, tea, cocoa, french beans and flowers rather
than growing food for household consumption. They have to do this to
generate the cash, to buy the seeds and associated chemical inputs such
as fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides from the corporations. In
addition they have no control of the pricing of the cash crops nor of
the food they have to buy as a result.
Patenting of living material is also being called 'biopiracy' because
corporations get genetic material from the farmers and local
communities, who are constantly developing new combinations and
characteristics. This old tradition has increased biodiversity,
productivity and innovation over the centuries, without using genetic
engineering technology or claiming private ownership of such resources,
which are considered a common heritage.
The idea that African farmers should have to buy seeds, developed from
their own biological materials, from transnational corporations, because
such companies have given themselves the exclusive rights to those
seeds, is outrageous. The rights and the capacity of communities to feed
themselves would be completely undermined, if industry managed to assert
its self-given rights. In the US, farmers are punished for re-using
patented seeds. Industry is trying to force farmers to buy seed each
season, which makes them totally dependent on the corporations (1)."
This conference is full of sessions on commercialisation interspersed
with a few feel good sessions on feeding the world. Be honest with
yourselves and admit that commercialisation, patenting and selling seeds
is the driver behind the work you do.
Furthermore I quote Bob Phelps from GeneEthics Network
GENETIC ENGINEERING WILL NOT FEED THE WORLD
First the Green Revolution, and now the Gene Revolution, are promoted as
the cure-all for world hunger. Agribusiness may appear to deliver cheap
food and fibre to Western consumers through global markets but the huge
environmental, social and health costs are largely hidden, especially
from urban dwellers. Genetic engineering will intensify, not solve,
these problems.
Chemical/industrial agriculture has produced rural poverty and
dispossession in Australia, while hundreds of millions of Third World
people suffer chronic starvation, landlessness, unemployment and urban
slums. CSIRO's Land and Water Division says two hundred years of
Euro-centred farming has caused massive soil loss, salination, water
pollution, species extinctions and desertification. Our ecosystems are
being depleted at a rate far beyond replacement. For example, each kilo
of grain fed to feedlot beef and battery chickens costs up to five kilos
of topsoil, washed or blown away. We must reform the ways we are fed,
clothed and housed.
Two main choices for agricultural production are now offered - the Gene
Revolution or Sustainable Ecological Farming Systems. Genetic
engineering would entrench industrial agriculture, through greater
corporate control, just when The World Watch Institute is warning that
the amount of food it can produce is in long term decline. In contrast,
organics promise truly fresh, clean, green production, more employment
and local food security.
With oil set to run out soon, we must develop a new paradigm to feed,
clothe and house the world's people sustainably. Gene technology is
part of the problem, not the solution. It is draining scarce resources
away from research and development where it is really needed, on
sustainable systems.
Thank you to those of you who have come today and chosen to listen.
Scott Kinnear.
At the end there was a viscous attack on organic food. Very dangerous
etc.
I'm sure that Scott would be very pleased if you spread his speech far
and wide!
Melbourne, AU. 6-9 August 2006
Scott Kinnear - Speech for Organic
Introduction about Myself
Firstly I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land,
whose ancestors have performed ceremonies and rituals here for thousands
of years.
Today I represent GeneEthics Network and the Biological Farmers of
Australia. GeneEthics Network and Greenpeace supporters were outside
handing out flyers when you came in on Monday and staged a sustainable
food fiesta in the park opposite at lunch time.
I understand you were told on the opening day to pay no attention to
these concerned citizens outside. But these are the interested public
who care most about food that you must convince if you want to sell your
genetically engineered products. My colleagues and friends were locked
out, and my presence here is no more than a token concession by the
organisers.
Perhaps you will also obey Ausbiotech and the Bracks Government as the
major sponsor of the conference in this session today and pay no
attention to what I have to say either.
I am a father of four teenagers, employ thirty people in my organic
retail businesses and have a degree in agricultural science majoring in
biochemistry. After I finished fourth year I was invited to a
professor's office and offered the opportunity to do a PhD in
biochemistry at the Australian National University. I ran out of that
office and have not stopped running since.
I represent a body of people who seek to make agriculture and the food
supply genuinely sustainable and healthy, for this and future
generations. We also oppose the corporate control of global resources by
just 500 transnational food production and processing companies that are
rapidly consuming the world.
Ag Biotech and genetic engineering are central to that paradigm, made
possible by a 5/4 ruling of the US Supreme Court in 1980 - the famous
Diamond versus Chakrabarty case - that allowed the patenting of
genetically engineered organisms. Coupled with corporations being
granted the same legal rights as natural persons, the stage has been set
for attempted corporate control of all life support systems on this
planet.
Question 1 asserts that Advances in agricultural biotechnology over the
last 10 years have been good for the environment.
My answer is unequivocally, NO, they have not!
I draw your attention to the structure of the program of this conference
- more than 60 speakers and only one dissenting voice. Even as the one
dissenter, it was not until the 21st July 06 that I was asked, which
seems like a token afterthought to me. Delving deeper into the program I
find that there are 2430 minutes of sessions, both plenary and breakout.
My 12 minutes equates to 0.4938 % of the conference time - approximately
one two hundredth of the program.
So how do I feel about yet another public relations talkfest, so full of
spin and silver bullets that I nearly did not bother to turn up today? I
remain an idealist and am always hopeful that perhaps somewhere amongst
the people who choose to listen, I will make a small connection. Perhaps
I will raise an awareness of the injustice inherent in the bias of this
program. I am particularly disappointed in the shameful way that, yet
again, feeding the 850 million starving people in the world is again
being used in the media by conference participants to guilt trip the
Australian public and policy-makers into accepting your technology and
its products. Present food production is sufficient to adequately feed
12 billion people yet agricultural subsidies for first world farmers,
poverty, unemployment and social upheaval deny the malnourished and
starving their basic human rights. GE crops cannot solve these
inequities.
Greenpeace wrote about the ABIC conference as follows:
"Melbourne is currently crawling with genetic engineering advocates,
in town for the annual Agricultural Biotechnology International
Conference (ABIC). And, with the predictability of clockwork, the tired
old lines about genetically engineered crops feeding the world are
getting dragged out from the conference propagandists. Dr Ganesh
Khishoor was supposed to be the impartial voice of the conference on ABC
radio's Bush Telegraph.
He spoke about how biotech must be accepted in countries like the US and
Europe, before work is done to benefit poorer countries. But this is the
same Dr Ganesh Khishoor who developed GE canola for Monsanto, and chief
biotechnology officer for Dupont. More than a slight vested interest
there."
But where is biotech going? Another look at the program reveals a
session with the title:
"Treating our Planet as Patient: Biotech Foods as Global
Medicine".
The arrogance of the authors of this session title beggars belief.
Surely most of you don't believe this new and innovative PR spin to
sit alongside "feeding the world". Another interpretation of
this title may be, "We are aiming to make all food crops on the face
of the planet genetically engineered ". What will be the social and
environmental implications of that future?
Question 2. The regulation of agricultural biotechnology adequately
addresses the risks.
My answer, NO it does not!
Scanning the conference document, I looked for the token session on risk
identification and management for Ag Biotech. Using the search function
the word `risk' appears but only once. This is the sentence:
"How do we get the average person to understand risk?"
This sentence appears in the intro for this session and is pretty
insulting since you locked the average people out of your conference
with a price tag of $500 a day. The risk to the personal safety and well
being of people is central to why genetic engineering (and Agricultural
Gene technology) is stalled. Clearly risk assessment and management is
not high on the agricultural gene tech agenda and this will further fuel
food buyer rejection.
You will see from the leaflet I hold here that you are welcome to pick
up after this session, that the bans on GE canola in Australia are fully
justified by the $65 per tonne premium which our farmers are presently
receiving from European buyers – a market that North American
growers had and have lost!!
I read with interest Prof Jennifer Thomson's opinion piece in The
Australian newspaper on Monday of this week. She addressed the risk
issue as follows:
"How safe is food derived from GM crops? Listen to Craig Venter, a
scientist who led the team that sequenced the human genome. No food
crop, he insists, has ever been tested for human safety as rigorously as
GM food crops. Indeed, in contrast, many conventional food crops can be
extremely toxic."
This is yet another example of a scientist speaking from on high outside
the province of their professional expertise. I do not accept the
opinions of a molecular biologist in relation to the safety of GM food
crops. I have spent a considerable amount of time listening to and
talking with Dr Judy Carman in Australia, a public health epidemiologist
and accept her views. The public are able to understand the difference
in expertise between these two people and heed Judy's well-founded
warnings. Hardening of resistance to GE foods and crops should be no
surprise to anyone. It is not the result of scaremongering as the GE
industry claims (ignoring its own scares about `feeding the
world')
Our federal regulators do not apply scientific criteria to assess the
risks of genetically engineered products. Nor are the applicants for a
licence required to submit robust, peer-reviewed scientific data that
can be objectively evaluated by the regulators and the public. Much of
the shonky data that is submitted remains commercially secret.
Confidence in regulation founders right here.
Gene Technology Regulation is based on the same flawed system of
chemical regulation. This is not surprising, given that the world's
largest chemical companies are heavily into agricultural gene
technology. Even a pallet of mostly unpublished and NOT peer-reviewed
studies accompanying an application inspires no confidence in the
system. Locking much of this data away shouting commercial in confidence
is equally uninspiring. Many of you people are responsible for the
greatest experiment on our health and the environment and you are not
held accountable.
How many times have I heard many of you say, "300 million Americans
have been eating GM foods for years with no peer reviewed and published
evidence of harm." But hold on. GM foods are not labelled in the US,
there is no health-monitoring program, there are no human feeding trials
to try and identify impacts, symptoms to look for etc. As Judy Carman
says, "Looking for the link between a significant jump in public
disease and a GE food is like looking for a needle in a haystack."
Question 3. Organic agriculture and GM crops are mutually exclusive.
My answer, YES they are.
And what do people increasingly want? By choice it is NOT biotech foods
grown by corporations in massive high input dependant monocultures
tended by machines rather than people.
Awareness is rapidly growing of the corporatisation, globalisation and
industrialisation of our food supply. In response people all over the
world are seeking out organic and biodynamic food. They are buying from
box schemes, farmers markets, specialist stores and are reconnecting to
the meaning of food. Food is health, food is warmth, food is family,
food is friends and food is, dare I say it, love. How can the biotech
world compete with that.
The further we go down the path towards insanity as a species, the more
we want to pump out all the oil, dig up all the coal and uranium, cut
down our forests and own life itself, the more the human spirit will
rebel against this.
I don't know what you really feel in your heart of hearts. Is this
just a job, are you doing it to get rich, are you driven by dreams of
truly saving the world, do you have a mortgage and this is your training
and you do not know what else to do. Well if you do feel uncomfortable
then you have a duty of care to speak out. If you do not want to do so
publicly and have concerns, then voice them privately to people with
influence. You may have information that can assist myself, Bob Phelps
or others to bring public focus to your concerns without revealing
yourself. There are eminent scientists who are saying that we are
looking down the barrel of eco-system collapse within 30 to 50 years. We
do not have much time to return to a sustainable system of agriculture.
I am convinced that agricultural biotech is completely the wrong
direction and that we need to turn the titanic around fast.
And to come back to the arguments put forward by Prof Thomson from
Africa in her opinion piece in The Australian. To quote Nobel Peace
Prize winner Wangari Mathai, Coordinator, The Green Belt Movement,
Nairobi, Kenya.
"History has many records of crimes against humanity, which were
also justified by dominant commercial interests and governments of the
day. Despite protests from citizens, social justice for the common good
was eroded in favour of private profits. Today, patenting of life forms
and the genetic engineering which it stimulates, is being justified on
the grounds that it will benefit society, especially the poor, by
providing better and more food and medicine. But in fact, by
monopolising the 'raw' biological materials, the development of other
options is deliberately blocked. Farmers therefore, become totally
dependent on the corporations for seeds. Market monopolies create
pricing structures which make biotech products inaccessible to the poor,
in whose name they are promoted. In fact the poor cannot access these
markets. Instead they are persuaded, coerced and sometimes forced, to
grow cash crops like coffee, tea, cocoa, french beans and flowers rather
than growing food for household consumption. They have to do this to
generate the cash, to buy the seeds and associated chemical inputs such
as fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides from the corporations. In
addition they have no control of the pricing of the cash crops nor of
the food they have to buy as a result.
Patenting of living material is also being called 'biopiracy' because
corporations get genetic material from the farmers and local
communities, who are constantly developing new combinations and
characteristics. This old tradition has increased biodiversity,
productivity and innovation over the centuries, without using genetic
engineering technology or claiming private ownership of such resources,
which are considered a common heritage.
The idea that African farmers should have to buy seeds, developed from
their own biological materials, from transnational corporations, because
such companies have given themselves the exclusive rights to those
seeds, is outrageous. The rights and the capacity of communities to feed
themselves would be completely undermined, if industry managed to assert
its self-given rights. In the US, farmers are punished for re-using
patented seeds. Industry is trying to force farmers to buy seed each
season, which makes them totally dependent on the corporations (1)."
This conference is full of sessions on commercialisation interspersed
with a few feel good sessions on feeding the world. Be honest with
yourselves and admit that commercialisation, patenting and selling seeds
is the driver behind the work you do.
Furthermore I quote Bob Phelps from GeneEthics Network
GENETIC ENGINEERING WILL NOT FEED THE WORLD
First the Green Revolution, and now the Gene Revolution, are promoted as
the cure-all for world hunger. Agribusiness may appear to deliver cheap
food and fibre to Western consumers through global markets but the huge
environmental, social and health costs are largely hidden, especially
from urban dwellers. Genetic engineering will intensify, not solve,
these problems.
Chemical/industrial agriculture has produced rural poverty and
dispossession in Australia, while hundreds of millions of Third World
people suffer chronic starvation, landlessness, unemployment and urban
slums. CSIRO's Land and Water Division says two hundred years of
Euro-centred farming has caused massive soil loss, salination, water
pollution, species extinctions and desertification. Our ecosystems are
being depleted at a rate far beyond replacement. For example, each kilo
of grain fed to feedlot beef and battery chickens costs up to five kilos
of topsoil, washed or blown away. We must reform the ways we are fed,
clothed and housed.
Two main choices for agricultural production are now offered - the Gene
Revolution or Sustainable Ecological Farming Systems. Genetic
engineering would entrench industrial agriculture, through greater
corporate control, just when The World Watch Institute is warning that
the amount of food it can produce is in long term decline. In contrast,
organics promise truly fresh, clean, green production, more employment
and local food security.
With oil set to run out soon, we must develop a new paradigm to feed,
clothe and house the world's people sustainably. Gene technology is
part of the problem, not the solution. It is draining scarce resources
away from research and development where it is really needed, on
sustainable systems.
Thank you to those of you who have come today and chosen to listen.
Scott Kinnear.
At the end there was a viscous attack on organic food. Very dangerous
etc.
I'm sure that Scott would be very pleased if you spread his speech far
and wide!