GMO: A Choice of Agricultural Policy

By Hervé Kempf
Le Monde

Tuesday 21 August 2007

Once again, this summer the environmental field will have been dominated by the GMO question. The controversy has been fed by the actions of the "Faucheurs volontaires" [literally "willful reapers": the GMO protesters who reap from GMO fields as Kempf describes later] in response to the increase in transgenic crops (over 20,000 acres of corn this year). It took a dramatic turn when a Lot farmer, Claude Lagorse, who was secretly growing a parcel of transgenic corn, killed himself the day before an anti-GMO protesters' scheduled August 5 demonstration in his village of Girac. Nothing suggests this drama can be attributed to the GMO question. But the effect it has had testifies to the emotional charge this issue has come to carry.

The "Faucheurs volontaires" have pursued their actions by seeking - not to vandalize transgenic fields - but to symbolically remove ears of corn. Nonetheless, certain unknown persons have several times destroyed parcels cultivated with genetically modified corn. On the other hand, organic farmers' experiments conducted to measure the contamination from GMO have been destroyed - also anonymously.

On top of that, part of the agricultural world has expressed its irritation: thus we heard Jean-Michel Lemétayer, President of the FNSEA [the largest French farmers' union], describe the GMO opponents' position as "obscurantism" on August 9; the platform of the seed-growers' industry used the same term in a July 24th communiqué; and another FNSEA official, Dominique Barrau, referred to the Faucheurs as an "African tribe."

Such terms are hardly likely to calm the debate. But they seem to run counter to a reality that the "Faucheurs volontaires" - whatever one thinks about the validity of their methods - express and which the Peasant Confederation which celebrated its 20th anniversary Saturday August 18 and Sunday August 19 also articulated: society's refusal to have GMOs - the utility of which it does not perceive - imposed upon it. That reality is well-understood by political officials: the "Faucheurs" won official recognition when they were received by the Secretary of State for Ecology, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet on July 31. For its part, at the beginning of July, the Association of the Regions of France, which represents the regional executives - almost all Socialists - reasserted in a vigorous manner its refusal to have GMO crops "imposed by force without the
slightest consultation."

The GMO question could, moreover, take on a broader political dimension, by threatening the success of the "Grenelle de l'environnement." Through the means of this series of meetings with environmental associations and professional groups, the government intends to re-launch environmental policy - which fell between the cracks under the previous team. But José Bové, the most visible figure among GMO opponents, remains liable to imprisonment at any moment for previous "Faucheurs volontaires" actions. On top of which, having removed an ear of corn August 5th at Murviels-lès-Béziers (Hérault), in the midst of two hundred other demonstrators, Bové expects to be summoned to the Béziers police station. His incarceration - which he intends to give the greatest possible visibility by threatening to begin a hunger strike - will undoubtedly lead
several of the most important associations to leave the Grenelle, thus ruining that program's credibility. Yet leaving Mr. Bové at liberty could appear as an additional confirmation of the legitimacy of his action.

The situation would not have become so tangled up had successive governments not allowed the situation to fester over many years. By failing to impose a procedure for informing neighboring farmers in cases of transgenic crop cultivation; by permanently hiding behind the opinions of the European Food Security Authority (EFSA) - the scientific neutrality of which has become ever more questionable; by failing to tackle head-on the question of coexistence between transgenic and non-transgenic agriculture; by secretly passing a decree - several days before the latest national elections - allowing those crops although the law that ought to have done so had not been discussed in Parliament, successive governments have behaved in a way that must be described as hypocritical: allowing the development of GMO crops without ever giving a highly reluctant public the impression that they were definitely authorizing them.

Possible Advantages

That attitude contrasts significantly with that of the British government: while clearly displaying its own position in favor of GMO, the British government was nonetheless able to develop independent appraisals and a truly open public debate. Thus was the situation disentangled - to the detriment, of course, of transgenic crops.

The complications of the GMO issue - uncertainty with respect to their possible advantages, their possible harmfulness, their real economic impact - do not facilitate the decision. But, at the same time, it is ever clearer than the transgenic question symbolizes a broader choice of agricultural policy: Either an industrial agriculture, closely integrated with the agribusiness industry, led by a limited number of highly competitive operators. Or a less intensive agriculture, focused more on quality than quantity, careful to respect the environment and health, but also with a direct job creation goal - and GMO are out of the running.

Refusing to lay down the rules on the transgenic question, all the while allowing transgenic crops to intrude - and to contaminate all agriculture, its opponents assert - is to de facto favor industrial agriculture, that is, the hyper-subsidized and polluting model the limits of which we see today. It's significant that the prudent United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in a report published in May, took a position in favor of organic agriculture. Making a synthesis of scientific studies, the FAO wrote: "Organic agriculture has the potential to satisfy global food demand, just as today's conventional agriculture does, but with a minor impact on the environment."

Logic requires that we listen to these agronomists and head towards this type of agriculture that is better accepted by citizens, less costly for society as a whole, and a greater engine for job creation. But that would, no doubt, displease industry and cut us loose from the agricultural globalization obsession, which develops, in fact, as far as Eastern Europe is concerned, by means of subsidies. In any case, the persistent quarrel over GMO leads to this choice of alternatives.