‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’ has a chapter called ‘False Dawns’ in which I wrote about dubious magic solutions to energy and food scarcity such as the hydrogen economy, nuclear fission and fusion, abiogenic oil, carbon storage, and genetic modification of agricultural crops. The section on genetic modification is headed ‘Genetic modification benefits big business, not small farmers’.

The alarming concentration of power over seed supplies, which worried me when I wrote the chapter, is portrayed in detail in ‘Seeds of Destruction’*, by F William Engdahl. ‘Seeds of Destruction’ catalogues the capture of world seed breeding by corporations, principally Syngenta, Dow, DuPont and, the most powerful of all, Monsanto.

Monsanto is the world’s dominant supplier of genetically modified seed. The seeds are ‘modified’ to improve Monsanto’s income stream, because the farmers purchasing them are contractually prohibited from saving any to re-use in a future planting. Many GM seeds are engineered to tolerate specific agrochemicals, such as Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. GM seeds are at the base of a corporate-controlled column that extends through cultivation technologies to the  sale, processing, manufacture and distribution of the crops farmers grow. In a further twist of the screw, the technology now exists to engineer seeds that self-destruct after a single use: they are sterile or terminator seeds.

Around three-quarters of the world’s farmers save their own seed for use the following year, a practice that terminator seeds would halt, forcing those farmers to buy fresh supplies every year. Generally, farmers’ own saved seeds come from plants well adapted to their local environments. The mega breeders like Monsanto are, for commercial reasons, concerned more with their seeds’ suitability for their own agrochemicals than with their fitness for local conditions.

Corporate control of seed production became far simpler after 1994, when the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade  (GATT) created the World Trade Organisation. One of the early outcomes was the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which allowed corporations to patent plant and animal life forms. The rush to patent genes, and gene combinations, began. F William Engdahl comments (‘Seeds of Destruction p.221) that:

“The WTO marked a step for the globalization of world agriculture, under terms defined by US agribusiness. WTO rules would open the legal and political path to the creation of a global ‘market’ in food commodities similar to that created by the oil cartel under the Rockefeller Standard Oil group a century before. Never before the advent of agribusiness had agriculture crops been viewed as a pure commodity with a global market price. Crops had always been local along with their markets, the basis of human existence and of national economic security.”

The US administrations in the 1990s — under George Bush senior and then Bill Clinton — backed the WTO’s constant pressures on nations to open up their markets for free trade that benefited corporations first and foremost, as they expanded and policed procurement and supply chains. George Bush senior decreed that genetically engineered or modified plants are “substantially equivalent” to their non-engineered counterparts and therefore do not require any special regulation. The WTO adopted this ruling as a binding Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (Engdahl p.221), which commands that food standards and measures aimed at protecting people from pests or animals can be potentially used as a deliberate barrier to trade . This meant that governments could not ban genetically modified foods because that would be a deliberate barrier to trade. Furthermore, even the labelling of crops and foods as genetically modified was outlawed as a ‘technical barrier to trade’ (Engdahl p.222).

Engdahl summarises the issue thus: “The doctrine of the WTO was simple: free trade — on terms defined by giant private agribusiness conglomerates — was to reign supreme above nation states and above the concern for human or animal health and safety. ‘Free market uber Alles’ was the motto”. (p.224)

GM crops have other potential uses apart from making profits for the organisations holding patents on them. The US government holds the patent for terminator gene technology, jointly with a major cotton-breeding company called Delta & Pine Land, which Monsanto acquired in 2006. It doesn’t require much imagination to see how terminator technology could be incorporated in covert operations to destabilise a regime. Engdahl includes a quote (p.xiv) from Henry Kissinger, secretary of state to US presidents Richard Nixon and then  Gerald Ford. The quote is  “Control the oil and you control nations. Control the food and you control the people”.

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* ‘Seeds of Destruction’, by F William Engdahl, was published in 2007 by Global Research of Montreal, Canada. The ISBN is 978-0-9737147-2-2.