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Europe’s Biotech Food Ban Must End Since May 2003, the United States, joined by Canada and Argentina, has The main opponents of such crops include the usual "environmental" organizations for whom any progress toward eliminating famine and disease is regarded as an increase in the Earth’s human population. If you’re a member of the Earth Liberation Front, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Center for Food Safety, and the Organic Consumers Association, among others, the scientific advances of biotechnology are bad news. If you are a member of the human race, however, genetically-modified foods (GMOs) means (1) an increase in agricultural productivity wherever such crops are grown; (2) crops that can resist the effects of drought, a common cause of crop failures; (3) the bioengineered increase of nutrients and a decrease of saturated fats in various food crops; and (4) the reduction of the use of insecticides and herbicides. Farmers will tell you GMOs, in addition to reducing the amount of water needed to grow certain crops, contribute to the reduction of soil erosion caused by agriculture. So why is the European Union refusing to permit the importation and use of GMOs? Alex Avery of the Hudson Institute probably said it best when he described it as "technological apartheid." While the Europeans are well fed, the fate of people in Africa and other Third World nations are of little importance to them for purely economic reasons. Avery points out that, "More than half of the EU’s collective budget is gobbled up by farm subsidy costs, so Europe has done all that it can to avoid productivity-enhancing technologies for cost savings." In the interest of keeping GMO crops from America and other nations out of Europe, the EU has declared that such crops may pose a health risk. They say that genetically modified crops, if grown in Europe, might "contaminate" organic crops. Baloney! For all the reasons stated above, GMO crops not only do not pose a threat to organic crops, except in terms of greater yields, they hold the potential for the virtual elimination of famines that cause the deaths of millions worldwide every year. The EU represents the fourth largest market for U.S. agricultural exports. The earnings were projected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at $7 billion for 2005, nearly 12% of all the U.S. agricultural exports. The main export products are soybeans, tobacco, and animal feed, including corn gluten. To date, the EU has not offered a scintilla of scientific evidence to justify the market bans imposed by some member states. The whole point of the World Trade Organization is to end frivolous bans in order to facilitate, well, world trade! The WTO even has an Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures that requires "sufficient scientific evidence" to support trade-restrictive regulations on crops and food products." Speaking in May 2003, President Bush said, "Our partners in Europe…have blocked all new bio-crops because of unfounded, unscientific fears. This has caused many African nations from investing in biotechnology for fear that their products will be shut out of European markets. European governments should join, not hinder, the great cause of ending hunger in Africa." The opponents of GMOs will tell you this is about consumers versus agricultural corporations or they will continue to fear-monger about the safety of GMO foods. It’s a government-to-government confrontation over food exports and more than a dozen nations, including South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Canada, Australia, Columbia, El Salvador, Honduras, New Zealand, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and Egypt, have expressed support for the U.S. initiative currently waiting a still-delayed decision by the EU. Putting aside the financial aspects of the ban EU member states have imposed, the issue of GMO safety has long since been decided. In 2004, the National Research Council, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, issued a report in which it found that genetic engineering is "not an inherently hazardous process", calling the fears of the anti-biotech crowd "scientifically unjustified." The report in fact repeated findings that date back to 1987. The United Kingdom-based Institute for Food Science and Technology found that "Genetic modification has the potential to offer very significant improvements in the quantity, quality and acceptability of the world’s food supply." Not only is there no cause to fear GMO food products, since the WTO case was launched in 2003, the planting of biotech crops has increased around the world at unprecedented rates. In 2005 alone, more than 81 million hectares were sown with biotech crops by more than eight million farmers in 17 countries; a 20% increase over the previous year. They are even being planted in European nations where farmers in Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Romania are taking advantage of the benefits they represent. While a favorable decision by the WTO opening European markets to GMO food choices will be good for consumers, the real winners will be the world’s farmers who have suffered the most under these de facto trade restrictions. So now we wait for the EU to do, at last, the right thing, the moral thing, by ending the GMO bans it has imposed. Watching the Senate committee hearing on the fitness of Judge Samuel Alito to be a new member of the Supreme Court only reminded me of the long history of the Senate as a break on whatever progress the United States strove to make as times changed. The notion that the Senate is filled with men and women who ponder the great issues of their times and conduct themselves in a manner befitting their high office has been continually dispelled in modern times from the televising of the McCarthy hearings to the present hearings on Judge Alito’s qualifications to serve on the highest court of the nation. Despite the victory of the North in the Civil War and even the passage of 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution abolishing slavery and affirming equal opportunity, it was the Senate that was the instrument of Southern Democrats who prolonged the injustices against blacks for another hundred years. It was the Senate that remained isolationist and resistant to the cruel realities of foreign aggression and oppression before both the First and Second World Wars. I was reminded of this by an excellent book, "The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate" by Lewis L. Gould ($27.50, Basic Books.) The Senate has been more wrong than right throughout history and Gould’s look at this Constitutional institution from 1900 through to our present day is instructive in the way its members, initially elected by state legislatures and only later directly elected to office, were largely indifferent to women’s rights, the suppression of the rights of Afro-Americans, and actually managed to prolong the Great Depression because of their ignorance of basic economics. Throughout the last century, as with its first, its members showed a remarkable tendency to be alcoholics, often being thoroughly drunk while conducting the affairs of the upper house. Many were womanizers. A great number of them were as dumb as a fence post. "The Framers of the Constitution," says Gould, "envisioned a Senate that would function as a wise and judicious check on both executive power and the House of Representatives." What they did not envision was the blind partisanship that now holds the Senate in its grip, "Nor would they have been pleased to see the Senate so focused on allocating federal appropriations to contributors and constituents." It is Gould’s view that "By 2005, the Senate had become more often an impediment to democratic government than a place to express sober second thought on national priorities." A reading of his book makes it plentifully clear that, through the use of the filibuster and the delaying tactics of the Senate’s rules, the upper house has almost always functioned as an impediment to progress. The most transforming of technologies to affect the Senate has been the introduction of television in the 1950s. Though the Senate did not want television coverage of its day-to- day dilatory behavior, it did yield to the televising of some of its committee hearings and finally, though reluctantly, yielded to C-SPAN’s daily coverage. Today, the gavel-to-gavel coverage of events like the grilling of Supreme Court nominees is common, but this is a modern phenomenon. Commenting recently on Sen. Joseph Biden and his desire to become president, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen noted that his performance at the Alito hearings reminded the world of his penchant for talking and talking and talking! Cohen noted that this is a common trait among senators. "After all, no one—with the possible exception of family members—ever tells a senator to shut up. They are surrounded by fawning staff and generally treated as minor deities." From what I saw, few are due much respect. Gould points out that today’s Senator spends most of his or her time raising the millions that are required to get elected and stay in office. In addition, as the federal government grew ever larger and more intrusive into the affairs of the economy and its citizens, the Senate reflected this. In 1971 the Senate had 4,100 employees and, a decade later, that number had risen to 6,900. These days, more than 8,000 people work for the Senate. It’s anual operating budget exceeds a half billion dollars. One might think, for that kind of money, we could hope for competent legislators. Largely unspoken is the fact that virtually every speech a Senator gives is written by staff members, as well as any question he might ask during a committee hearing. The ability of a Senator to actually think for himself about a truly serious issue and to articulate those thoughts is the province of a relative handful of those who hold the office. The ability of a single Senator to bring any piece of legislation to a standstill remains unchallenged except through the laborious rules of the upper chamber. From my perspective, nothing bodes well that the Senate will be anything more than a vast sinkhole of corruption, partisanship, and embarrassment for the nation. It is through the work of The National Anxiety Center that visitors to this site and readers of excerpts of "Warning Signs" are able to get a glimpse of the real workings of the world. To continue that work, the Center needs your donation. It needs it today and it will need it in the days ahead. If you prefer to send a check, please make it payable to The Caruba Organization, 28 West Third Street, Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079. Thank you!
©
2006 Alan Caruba. |
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pursued a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement process against the European Union (EU) regarding its de facto moratorium against biogenetically altered food crops.