Genetic Engineering, Food and Our Environment: A Brief Guide - Softcover

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Luke Anderson is a journalist, speaker and campaigner who specialises in issues related to genetic engineering. He is a consultant to the Soil Association s genetic engineering campaign, and has written on the subject for other environmental organisations such as Greenpeace International.

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In June 1998, Monsanto launched a £1 million advertising campaign designed to "encourage a positive understanding of biotechnology". Months later, a report written for Monsanto by Stanley Greenberg, polling adviser to Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, revealed that the advertising campaign "was, for the most part, overwhelmed by the society-wide collapse of support for genetic engineering in foods." There were, said the report, "large forces at work that are making public acceptance problematic."

These "large forces" consist of concerned individuals, local initiatives, church groups, conservation bodies, scientists, farmers, consumer organisations, environmentalists, and others. The annual revenue of the biggest of the international organisations campaigning on this issue- Greenpeace-amounts to a mere fraction of 1% of the revenue of a corporation such as Monsanto, while most of the campaigning has come from local groups or individuals with no real budget to speak of at all. As one of Monsanto's executives was reported to have said at a training conference, "These people work for nothing-how can you stop that?"

Resistance has taken many forms, from the half million Indian farmers who marched carrying neem branches to protest against the World Trade Organisation and the patenting of life, to the woman from the UK who wrote to Monsanto billing them for £6,418 and 82 pence for the trouble she has had to go to in order to avoid GE soya.

"Diversity has characterised the campaign from its start," says Anne Ward, a local campaigner from Totnes, in Devon, England, where feelings ran high after a test site for genetically engineered maize was planted 275m from an organic farm. "Totnes is quite a fragmented community, made up of many disparate groups of people. So I have been amazed at the way genetic engineering has galvanised the community into action. I have been involved in campaigns in this town for years, but I have never seen so many people of all ages, political persuasions and class come together like this. I remember in particular one lady in her 80s who walked for three miles to get to a demonstration-it was the first one she had been to in her life."

Similar experiences have been widely reported, not only on a local level, but also among established organisations that are beginning to form new and sometimes unusual alliances. As Zac Goldsmith commented in a recent editorial for The Ecologist, this "can only lead to admiration for Monsanto, who have single-handedly managed to unite a divided social and ecological movement."

By 1999 major supermarkets, food producers, beverage companies, animal feed suppliers and restaurants across Europe and also in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Thailand, the US, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil and Hong Kong, were bowing to pressure from the public, and beginning to exclude genetically engineered ingredients from their own-brand products. This even included corporations such as Unilever, the largest processed food producer in the world, which belongs to the multinational consortium EuropaBio. Just two years after EuropaBio hired PR company Burson Marsteller to help convince the public of the benefits of genetic engineering, Unilever was forced to withdraw genetically engineered soya from its foods in the UK, after consumer boycotts reduced sales of its product 'Beanfeast' by more than 50%.