‘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.

Mob rule applies when there is no legal system, or the legal system is ineffectual.

Plato (427-347BC) and Aristotle (384-322BC) both argued for a rule of law to bind rulers to just principles. Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755), in pre-revolutionary France,  proposed that the legislature, executive and judiciary must be separate, to best maintain the rule of law in circumstances that are always complex and shifting. I wish these political thinkers were here today to consider how the rule of law can apply to transnational corporations, which operate across multiple jurisdictions and are thus not controllable by any nation state.

When corporations can buy lawmakers and judges, thus undermining the independence of both the legislature and the judiciary, the law is seriously weakened. In developing countries, corporations and the free trade rules imposed by their client body, the World Trade Organisation, can impede the impartial functioning of the legal system, as in Guatemala, to give one of several possible examples. In states that have imploded into chaos, like Somalia,  or which have been deliberately constructed and then deconstructed, like Iraq, the rule of law has been squashed by the law of the gun.

Guatemalan newspapers — who employ some very brave journalists — report mob beatings and lynchings and frequent assassinations. Each year about one Guatemalan in 2,275 is murdered within the country.* The legal system is corrupt and slow, and cannot begin to hold powerful corporations and organisations to account.

Here in the UK the judiciary is still notionally separate from the legislature, but is in danger of becoming a tool of government, as the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq is showing in relation to the opinion whether the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 was legal or illegal. If the judiciary becomes the pawn of the legislature, we can say goodbye to the tripartite governance advocated by de Montesquieu as essential for a just nation.  At the international level, corporations can walk all over the nation states in which they do business. Do we want a similar free-for-all within the state as well as above the state? As resources become scarcer (see ‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’) the rule of law could be the only just defence against a violent free-for-all in the competition for survival.  The desperate gangs in post-earthquake Haiti, using their machetes to scythe their way  through crowds to  grab food and drink, give us a Hobbesian** preview of how alarming life can be when raw power is the determinant of individual surival.

*The population of Guatemala is about 14.02m but probably about 1.1m are resident in the USA, mainly as illegals, leaving 12.92m or so within Guatemala. The homicide rate is 43.97 per 100,000 persons, according to nationmaster.com.

**Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, English philosopher who regarded life as intrinsically solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Extract from Empty Plates Tomorrow? – Systems and Individuals: Taking a Stand, or why it is worth battling for change even if for years public opinion does not appear to shift.
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