Bovine Growth Hormone, Genetic Engineering and the New World Order
by Mitchel Cohen
Page 4
As the industry grows more sophisticated, genetic engineering -- which reduces everything in nature to objects for commercial manipulation, the commodification of life itself, and the constant genuflection before the gods of profit -- and the private-patenting of seeds provide international capital with powerful weapons for imposing the IMF, World Bank, and USAID's “structural adjustment programs” on the Third World.
Take the new genetically engineered corn. Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a naturally occurring insect repellant that organic farmers effectively apply in small doses to individual plants. In the early 1990s, Novartis (the gigantic corporation recently invented by combining Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz) patented a way of encoding each corn plant to produce its own Bt. Instead of limited amounts of Bt being applied in specific and well-defined areas, Bt now is produced in every cell of every plant over entire fields of genetically engineered corn. Not only does this kill insects beneficial to crop pest management, it quickens widespread resistance among undesired pests, reducing diversity and, in effect, making it easier for diseases to spread quickly across the entire field, rendering Bt -- which is relatively harmless to humans -- completely ineffective and depriving organic farmers of one of the few insecticides that they can use safely.
As weeds and insects are repeatedly exposed to herbicides and pesticides, the varieties tolerant to the toxin survive and become the norm, reducing (and even eliminating) its effectiveness, requiring farmers to apply heavier doses of pesticide to kill increasingly resistant pests. Organisms that had been under control now become veritable plagues wiping out enormous quantities of crops. Genetically engineered foods subject us to viruses, bacteria and other organisms that mutate into more virulent strains for which we've developed no resistance. Scientists race the blights by “designing” new insecticides and herbicides before bacteria, viruses and fungi are able to modify their capacities accordingly. This only leads to an acceleration of the crop chemical treadmill, where farmers use more and stronger chemicals to control pests, more chemicals in the environment, more damage to nearby plant varieties and soil fertility, and vast reduction of biodiversity. And so, as we move into the new millennium, we find that in just 100 years, the world has lost 95 percent of the genetic diversity that existed in agriculture at the beginning of this century. [U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report.]
Agribusiness already dumps more than 500 million pounds of herbicides on U.S. farmlands each year. Monsanto's Roundup, whose product sales come to $1.2 billion a year, leads the toxic parade. A study released in August 1995 found that levels of herbicides in drinking water in 29 cities and towns tested in the Corn Belt exceeded federal safety levels.
And now, researchers at Riso National Laboratory in Denmark are finding that plants -- whose "natural" immunities develop over many years through the interaction of many varieties, species, and microbes as part of a coherent (if fragile) ecosystem -- spontaneously cross-fertilize. Genetically engineered canola (rapeseed), for instance, passes its genes for herbicide resistance to surrounding weeds; the same is true of other plants. The offspring resulting from the cross-breeding of genetically engineered and weedy plants are not only herbicide-resistant themselves, they also are capable of passing on resistance to subsequent generations.
Unlike defective products of other technologies, genetically altered organisms, once released, are irretrievable and self-replicating. Herbicide-resistant qualities can spread to weeds. Rapid-growth capacities can spread to pests. Antibiotic resistance can spread to bacteria such as staphylococcus, diphtheria, salmonella, bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid and a whole range of dangerous diseases. And genes for new and virulent toxins can, accidentally or purposefully, spread to wild plants. Engineering on the genetic level introduces dangers of a qualitatively different magnitude which can easily become irreversible. Genetically engineered life forms are on the verge of permanently disrupting the already precarious ecological balance of the planet.
Why Didn't Government Just Say “No”?
In the global capitalist system, “research and development” means the public takes all the risk and pays for development and corporations then privatize that knowledge and reap the profits. Human health and safety, and environmental degradation, are rarely factored in, relative to determining corporate costs. In such a system, genetic engineering makes monocropping the cost effective option. It fills acre after acre with the same kind of crop, the easier to utilize certain kinds of machinery and chemicals, “speeding up” agricultural production the way Taylorism assembly-lined industry.
Genetically engineered soybeans, corn and corn syrup (a sweetener used in almost everything we drink), potatoes, strawberries and cotton are now coming to market. rBGH continues to be the spearhead of the new genetic engineering technologies which are overturning the previously un-breechable biological boundaries between species, and even between the plant and animal kingdoms.
I've already outlined a number of reasons why rBGH is bad: The cows get sick more often, die more quickly, and there's pus and increased hormone levels of all sorts in the milk, which are potentially cancer-causing. There is already a milk surplus in the U.S. and no need to artificially induce cows to produce more. Thousands of dairy farmers are being driven out of business by large factory-farms; rBGH accelerates that process, in line with the IMF's and World Bank's structural adjustment programs.
Yet Monsanto, along with such huge transnational corporations as Novartis and Eli Lilly (in which the family of former Vice President Dan Quayle holds controlling interest), remain unregulated warlords over their fiefdoms policing dissidents and public health advocates.
How could this have happened? In 1993 the Food and Drug Administration approved recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone for use in milk cows without performing the required long-term health studies. The FDA official who “fast-tracked” rBGH approval was Michael R. Taylor. Until 1991, Taylor had been a law partner at King & Spaulding and lawyered on behalf of Monsanto during the FDA approval process of rBGH. He was soon appointed to the Food and Drug Administration, where he “fast-tracked” rBGH approval. Upon becoming Deputy FDA Commissioner, Taylor appointed others from Monsanto to positions at the FDA, with President Clinton’s approval. Margaret Miller, former chemical laboratory supervisor for Monsanto, was one of them. She is now Deputy Director of Human Food Safety and Consultative Services, New Animal Drug Evaluation Office, Center for Veterinary Medicine in the US Food and Drug Administration. She published a number of pro- rBGH papers as an FDA official which were co-authored by Monsanto’s hirelings, and called for policy directives exempting rBGH-milk and other genetically engineered foods from labeling.
Meanwhile, Richard Borroughs, the doctor who originally supervised the rBGH target animal safety studies, was fired (under pressure from Monsanto) for insisting on enforcement of stringent animal health standards in rBGH research.
King & Spaulding continued to represent Monsanto even as its former directors and employees fast-tracked rBGH approval through the FDA. Monsanto filed lawsuits against dairies that had labeled their milk “rBGH-free,” and threatened to sue any dairy company making similar claims. Monsanto never won any of those suits; but the hundreds of millions of hormones) it was willing to spend has enabled the company to get away with strong arming dairies refusing to inject their cows with the hormone, and deterred small companies from labeling their products as "rBGH-free". Despite failing to win a single round in the courts, Monsanto has been nevertheless able to create enough economic and political intimidation on smaller companies to win economically what it cannot win in the courts.
In March 1994, the Pure Food Campaign and the Foundation for Economic Trends, under the leadership of Jeremy Rifkin, petitioned the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate Taylor's apparent conflict of interest. Three members of Congress then asked the General Accounting Office to investigate. Within days of the FET complaint, Taylor was mysteriously transferred out of the FDA.
But Taylor and Miller are hardly the only officials doing Monsanto's bidding inside the government. As Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown did more than anyone to insure that Clinton and Gore became, indeed, the Administration from Monsanto. As head of the Democratic National Committee Brown garnered huge financial contributions from the biotech industry and vigorously promoted their interests. Brown also fought for the biotech industry's attempts to patent genetically engineered human cells against the opposition of foreign governments: “Under our laws, as well as those of many other countries, subject matter relating to human cells is patentable and there is no provision for considerations relating to the source of the cells that may be the subject of a patent application.” [Ron Brown, letter to the Ambassador of the Solomon Islands, as quoted in Multinational Monitor, June 1994.] At the time his plane crashed over war-torn Yuogslavia, Brown was accompanying a few dozen high-level corporate executives seeking to ferret out “investment opportunities” among the misery there. [For more on Ron Brown's role in the Clinton Administration, see Mitchel Cohen, “All the Dictator's Men,” which also includes a short essay on the role of former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, in "The U.S./U.N. Occupation of Haiti, Neoliberalism & the IMF," (1995) and updated in a separate essay: "The Truth About Ron Brown: Why is Cornel West Saying All These Nice Things About Him?," Red Balloon FactSheet, 1996.]
The conflicts of interest between government and industry are appalling -- and dangerous. From Brown on down, the Clinton/Gore administration has catered to every outrageous whim of the biotech industry. Much of the government's position on genetic engineering falls under the supervision of former Hunter College president Donna Shalala, who is Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services. Except for Clinton and Gore, it is Shalala who has final say over these odious policies and corruption. And it is the “progressive” Shalala who has let Monsanto and the other corporations get away, literally, with murder. Take the case of Mickey Kantor, a power-broker, former U.S. Trade Representative and trusted Clinton adviser. Kantor became Secretary of Commerce following Ron Brown's death and continued his predecessor's boosterism for biotechnology. In mid-1997, Kantor left his job at Commerce. He was immediately appointed to the Board of Directors of ... the Monsanto Corporation.
Joining officials who changed job assignments from service in government to positions in the biotechnology industry was Marcia Hale. She had been assistant to the President of the United States for intergovernmental affairs. Her new appointment: Senior official for the Monsanto Corporation in coordinating public affairs and corporate strategy in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Also switching sides over the last couple of years were:
- L. Val Giddings, who went from being a biotechnology "regulator" at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to being the Vice President for Food and Agriculture at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a pro-biotech propaganda arm. Giddings, who had represented U.S. government (and, purportedly, the people's) interests at the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Biosafety Protocol, attended the second meeting on the protocol as the representative of the industry;
- David W. Beler, former head of Government Affairs for Genentech, Inc., and now chief domestic policy advisor to Al Gore;
- Linda J. Fisher, former Assistant Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Pollution Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances, and now Vice President of Government and Public Affairs for Monsanto;
- Josh King, former director of production for White House events, and now director of global communications in the Washington, D.C. office of Monsanto;
- Terry Medley, former administrator of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the US Department of Agriculture, former chair and vice-chair of the US Department of Agriculture Biotechnology Council, former member of the US Food and Drug Administration food advisory committee, and now Director of Regulatory and External Affairs of Dupont's Agricultural Enterprise;
- William D. Ruckelshaus, former chief administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, now (and for the last 12 years) a member of the board of directors of Monsanto;
- Lidia Watrud, former microbial biotechnology researcher at Monsanto, now with the US Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Effects Laboratory, Western Ecology Division; and,
- Clayton K. Yeutter, former Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, former US trade representative (who led the US team in negotiating the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement and helped launch the Uruguay round of the GATT negotiations), now a member of the board of directors of Mycogen Corporation, whose majority owner is Dow AgroSciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical.
Should any of the legal cases make their way to the Supreme Court they will come before, among others, Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas -- one might remember from Anita Hill's testimony -- began his career as a lawyer for ... Monsanto. And one of the chief witnesses on behalf of Monsanto will be Dr. Louis Sullivan, former head of Health and Human Services and now a paid apologist for the company.