We are in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. All areas of our lives have been permeated by technological interference. Agriculture, an inherently slow practice governed by nature’s cycles, has been particularly susceptible to technofixes – the use of technological solutions to address real or perceived problems. The most sought after technologies are those that promise to speed up those biological cycles and eliminate genetic variation for productivity and profit.

Here we look at technofixes specifically in the context of the UK dairy industry. The decline of this industry over the past 50 years has added to the pressure on farmers to incorporate dystopian technologies – that is, products which impose extreme levels of surveillance and control on living beings.

In this report, we set out the technological changes taking place in the industry and the corporate interests driving them, including:

• the intensification of livestock-rearing;
• the growth in the genetic uniformity of livestock, and moves towards gene edited plants and animals;
• total systems of tagging and tracking;
• the full automation of the milking process; and
• the use of technofixes to reduce the carbon footprint of the industry.

Despite some efforts to portray these technologies as beneficial to the animals, many in fact have severe implications for their welfare and freedom – as well as for our relationship with our food.

Dairy’s decline

The UK dairy industry is in trouble. People in the UK drink half the milk they did 50 years ago, and the image of the milkman delivering glass bottles to people’s houses is now largely a throwback to the past. Individuals are consuming smaller quantities of the white stuff, and growing numbers are abandoning it altogether.

Why? Changing tastes, the growth in alternatives, and rising disposable income are all to varying degrees likely to have influenced this shift.

However, the rise in veganism on environmental, animal rights or human health grounds has certainly been a factor in recent years. Besides concerns over significant land and water use, the meat and dairy industries continue to draw heavy criticism for their role in climate change – mainly through deforestation for animal feed crops and methane emissions from burping cows. Some scientists argue that avoiding meat and dairy is the “single biggest way” to reduce our impact on the planet.

Animal rights concerns range from the repeated impregnation of cows to produce milk, and the toll this takes on their bodies; the distress caused by the forced separation of mothers from their calves; the treatment of male calves, many of whom are shot at birth for economic reasons; and cows generally being treated as machines rather than sentient beings with their own desires. Finally, health concerns include the relationship between high levels of milk consumption and diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Meanwhile, the huge growth in alternatives has inevitably made ditching dairy more thinkable; a third of the UK population is now drinking plant-based milks – either alongside or instead of cow’s milk.

Another major blow has been Brexit, which has significantly worsened the outlook of the industry. Milk and cream sales to the EU were down a whopping 96% in the year 2020-21 – over twice that of the 40% overall decline in food and drink exports. Sales to the EU represented nearly 80% of the UK’s total pre-Brexit dairy export, and things are so bad that the government is planning a lump sum payment scheme of up to £100,000 for farmers wanting to exit the business.

In the context of this slow-burning crisis in reputation, demand and sales, many farmers have been turning to technological solutions.

The Rise of the Megadairies

Photo by Sebastien on Unsplash

Despite the declining market, there are still some 8,000 dairy producers in the UK. While the actual dairy cow population across the country has dropped by at least 28% since 1996, there has been a corresponding population concentration and an intensification in farming practices. The number of UK dairy farms with large herds has grown, while the number with small ones has shrunk. This is a pattern that is echoed across different livestock and cereals sectors. There has also been a “stealth rise” in the number of so-called megadairies – farms whose dairy herds number over 700 cows.

Yield has grown too: despite the fall in the overall number of cattle, farms have become more extractive, with quantities of milk produced per UK cow increasing 100% since 1975. This has been achieved through numerous technologies, the main being selective breeding and automation. Yet in an unending quest for productivity, these technologies are themselves undergoing major change.

Technofixes

From selective breeding to gene-edited animals?

Selective breeding has been one of the biggest factors behind this increase in milk production over the past few decades. Like all livestock today, the modern dairy cow is a very distant beast from her wild ancestors. Generations of human control over reproduction, particularly since the Agricultural Revolution in the 18th century, has ensured that cattle are produced with the most desirable traits for milk production – such as docile personalities and a high yield.

Selective breeding for particular traits using a very limited gene pool has resulted in extreme inbreeding. Virtually all the world’s Holsteins, a top dairy breed, descend from just two bulls bred in the 1960s. Due to the degree of inbreeding, although there are 9 million Holsteins in the US, their “effective population” stands at just 43. In the wild, animals with an effective population of less than 50 are classed as being at immediate risk of extinction. But this won’t happen to Holsteins, since the industry’s total control over their reproduction forces them to continually give birth.

In the UK, the rate of inbreeding has risen significantly since 1990. A 2004 study in the Journal of Dairy Science identified that between 96-98% of UK Holsteins were inbred to some degree, compared with around 50% in 1990. Yet there are clear limits to what this technofix can achieve: extreme selective breeding based on “productive” characteristics can in fact lead to lower productivity due to disorders and health problems.

Photo by Amber Kipp on Unsplash

If there wasn’t already enough interference in cows’ reproduction, a new and more disturbing development is on the horizon: gene editing (“GE”). This is a form of genetic modification which enables breeders to achieve traits not possible by simple artificial selection, for example, cattle that are faster growing, hornless, or disease resistant.

The use of Genetically Modified (“GM”) plants is tightly controlled in the UK and GM crops are not grown here commercially, though there have been trials. But that is largely a legacy of EU membership, and Brexit has shifted the goal posts. A European Court of Justice ruling had kept gene editing at bay on the continent by refusing to recognise a distinction between GE and genetic modification. Yet in the wake of Brexit, the government wasted absolutely no time in overturning existing protections, and in January 2021 it ran a “consultation” on whether gene editing should be treated more leniently.

Despite 88% of individual respondents supporting the continued regulation of gene editing as GM, the government announced regulatory changes on the practice just a few months later. It said it would “cut red tape and make research and development easier”. A “Precision Breeding” Bill is now going through parliament to provide a minimal regulatory framework for the research and commercial production of GE plants and animals. For the time being, this will allow scientists to carry out research on gene-edited crops in England with less red tape and expense. The government has also made it clear that in the longer term, there would be a “review of England’s approach to GMO regulation more broadly”.

According to Gideon Henderson, the chief scientific officer at DEFRA, engineered livestock will be next. Genetics companies such as Genus have been developing GE livestock for years, and powerful lobbyists such as the National Farmers’ Union are predictably pushing for its use. It doesn’t help that George Eustice – former UKIPer, best friend of the dairy industry, and current Agriculture and Environment Minister – is a strong advocate of the technology. The spin is already being spewed, with the government claiming that “gene editing has a vital role to play in helping address animal welfare concerns and reducing the carbon footprint of livestock production”.

Environmental groups emphasise the distinctive set of risks that gene editing carries to both the individual organism and the environment. For one, claims that it is a precise art have been strongly disputed. It can bring about unexpected mutations, and new or increased levels of toxins or allergens in plants. When US biotech start up Recombinetics used gene editing to produce hornless dairy calves, they also accidentally introduced genes from another species (bacteria which had been used to carry out the process), that conferred resistance to three antibiotics. It is feasible that these genes could transfer to disease-causing bacteria, rendering them resistant to antibiotics and potentially posing a risk to humans. The error was only picked up in checks by the US Food and Drug Administration, oversight which Recombinetics had vociferously resisted. And by that point the genetic trait is thought to have been passed down to the animals’ offspring, at least some of whom were subsequently culled. The project, initially heralded as a breakthrough for animal welfare with “no unwanted effects”, turned into a disaster.

Livestock genetics companies have catalogues featuring grotesquely oversized, specially-bred animals, such as the ones in these Semex magazines

Gene-edited hornless cattle are a clear example of how technofixes can be a means to profit from a “problem” that is itself manufactured by industry. In industrial agriculture, calves routinely have their horns removed with searing hot irons in a process known as “disbudding”. It’s an extremely painful and distressing procedure for the calf that can result in the animal losing consciousness. The rationale is to prevent cattle from injuring each other – and people – either during transportation or through their otherwise cramped and stressful conditions. GE hornless cattle are promoted as a solution to the hassle and pain of disbudding. But that “need” is entirely the product of a certain farming culture, and in many parts of the world farmers do not remove the animals’ horns at all.

Gene editing takes selective breeding to another level by allowing scientists to increasingly pick and choose specific genetic traits desired for mass reproduction. But as we’ve seen, artificial selection has resulted in dangerous levels of inbreeding. To paraphrase Friends of the Earth, whereas ecological resilience lies in species’ diversity, GMO science relies on predictability. Gene editing will only take us further down the disastrous path of uniformity with the added risks involved in manipulating DNA itself.

‘Robot-ready cows’

Over the course of the 20th century, hand milking was replaced by a combination of automated and manual processes. The total robotisation of the milking process has been growing since the 1990s, with 10% of UK dairy farms using fully-automated systems in 2019. In other Northern European countries, home to the leading suppliers of robotised milkers, the figure is double that.

It works like this: cows wear RFID chips, which allow them to be identified. Incentivised by the lure of food, they pass through checkpoints and either enter a single machine, or a stand in a large rotary unit. Robotic arms locate, sterilise, hose down and attach themselves to the cow’s udders. Sensors monitor the cow’s output, how much milk each teat gives, and whether there are any changes to the milk. After milking, the gate opens and the cow leaves.

Robotisation is claimed to increase yield and significantly decrease labour requirements. It is also presented as beneficial to animal welfare, since many systems rely on the cow entering the milking system ‘voluntarily’ to access food.

A rotary milking parlour. Image: dolgachov

Yet automation of the process is clearly not enough: the animals too must “evolve” along with the machines. Enter the “robot-ready cows”. These are cows specially bred by livestock genetics companies like Semex for traits best suited to being milked by a robot. Such traits include the “correct” udder shape and length to ensure a good fit with the machines, higher milking speeds, and pliable personalities. Animals who do not adapt well to this new conveyor belt regime are likely to be culled.

Why stop at extreme selective breeding and genetic modification? In the eyes of some agritech companies, hormonal cycles are fair game too. While injecting hormones to stimulate milk production is banned in the UK and EU on animal health grounds, some companies are using light to manipulate the animals’ natural cycles. The lighting reportedly influences their circadian rhythms to stimulate hormones and increase milk yield, as “the cows’ reproductive cycle must be tricked into resuming it earlier than is natural”. Kew LED and Dairy Light are two such companies in the UK marketing LED lighting in cattle sheds which can deliver “summer-light conditions all year-round”.

Sensors and shocks

Automated milking relies heavily on the use of sensors, truly the biggest fad today in animal agritech. Sensors are in the cowsheds, on the milking robots, in the fields, attached to the animals, and even in their guts. There’s now a plethora of startups competing to sell various forms of livestock surveillance gadgets, often promoted under the guise of animal welfare. From “facial recognition for cows” to bluetooth ear tags, these sensors monitor the animals’ movements, hormonal cycles, health and behaviour. Again, most of these factors are essential to achieving one key objective: a higher pregnancy rate. A sick cow is an unproductive cow.

Some startups have gone yet a step further: shock collars to control the movements of “free range” cattle. These are inevitably not marketed as such; instead they’re presented as a way of allowing livestock to graze in the fields and save on fencing costs. As the animal approaches the invisible boundaries determined by the farmer, the collar emits a sound. And if the cow doesn’t turn around, they receive an electric shock.

“Draw your virtual fence anywhere on your property, and your cattle are trained to remain within the virtual barrier”, says one supplier. The idea is that the area can easily be moved to cover fresh terrain by simply redrawing the map boundaries. Yet we can only guess at how much confusion this will cause the cows, as they tentatively navigate the edges of an entire perimeter in search of untouched pasture. This is to say nothing of the impact on their ability to run around as they would naturally. The lack of the usual visual clues could be disorientating for the animals, and as the RSPCA point out, some cows learn how to avoid the shocks far more quickly than others. A number never quite get to grips with how the system works, to their detriment and suffering.

Another danger of these technologies is that they’re invisible to people as well. The public will be unaware that free-range cattle in the fields may in fact be bombarded with sounds or electric shocks, and may object less to this practice than seeing farm hands with electric cattle prods.

A few taps on a farmers’ phone and automated feedlots can release more pellets, cows can be corralled, and udders can be hosed down from the comfort of the farmers’ living room. In many cases these things can happen entirely automatically, and the modern farmer need have very little real contact with the animals at all.

Will these gadgets have any beneficial impact on animal welfare as claimed? Automation will reduce contact with farmers, which can be stressful for the animals. But equally, being corralled and controlled by unseen machine systems such as virtual fence shock collars, is likely to be confusing and potentially even more distressing.

While some of the sensors also pick up on health problems, most issues detected will require human intervention. Given the severe impact of alienation on our relationship with nature (and each other), we have to wonder whether farmers who have less contact with their animals will have the same degree of care. Meanwhile, sensors will not be the magic bullet in disease detection. They can be unreliable and malfunction, while the growth in dependency on machines can potentially degrade the knowledge of farmers long-term.

Photo by MRC Témiscamingue on Unsplash

Low-emission cows?

Double-speak is rife on Dystopian Farm: from shock collars sold as necklaces of freedom and sensors merely monitoring the animals’ health, to ‘low-emission’ cows. Indeed, the environmental impact of the dairy industry is one more issue that technofixes claim to be able to reckon with.

Of all livestock, cattle produce the highest rate of greenhouse gas emissions by far (62% of the total emissions from livestock farming). Methane is over than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. While some people are opting to cut dairy and beef altogether, many scientists are developing technofixes to prop-up the industry. Zelp (Zero Emissions Livestock Project), a startup launched at the Royal College of Art, has developed cattle masks which convert methane to CO2. Cargill, agribusiness giant and animal feed provider linked to massive Amazon deforestation, will be the exclusive distributor of this “green” technology in Europe. Other solutions being explored in the UK include breeding cows or gene editing their food crops so that they burp less; while technologies currently being developed abroad include using gene editing to remove the predisposition towards certain gut bacteria, and even developing vaccines against their natural gut microbes.

Yet as Friends of the Earth point out, gut flora is essential to animals’ immune systems, and interference may have serious health implications. Rather than invest in education to influence food production systems and more ethical dietary choices, many researchers are choosing to put their money into the continued manipulation and exploitation of animals’ bodies. For some, the devasting impact of animal agriculture is merely another business opportunity. They know full well that despite the growth in veganism, meat and dairy consumers are still in the distinct majority, and it’s more profitable to sustain these industries – even through extreme technologies – than it is to invest in education and alternatives.

Conclusion

By monitoring and controlling their movement, their environment, their production and reproduction, their physical traits and even their personalities, corporations have attained truly totalitarian control over livestock.

Many of these technologies are no doubt effective in achieving their narrow, short-term objectives of increasing yield and profit. There is after all no shortage of eager entrepreuneurs – nor for that matter, venture capitalists willing to throw money at them.

But whether we actually want this dystopian picture is an altogether different question. Dominating nature begets problems, both for animal and human health. Milk production, circadian rhythms and genetic variation all exist for very important reasons, none of which relate to corporate profit. The full dangers of interference with these natural processes are still unknown to us, but the documented impact of extreme selective breeding on animal health and the tale of the gene-edited cattle should spell alarm.

Ditching meat and dairy, consuming local produce, working with nature’s cycles, supporting small-scale farming; many solutions to meet our food demand such as permaculture are slower, low tech, and won’t produce big bucks for start ups and their investors. But they’re often healthier, lower impact, and far more ethical. And crucially, they’re also within people’s reach, offering possibilities for autonomy from multinationals and their machines.

What can we do?

If you’re disturbed by many of the developments discussed in the article, there are things you can do. Go vegan, subscribe to a locally-grown veg box scheme, and participate in seed swaps to preserve genetic diversity. Get active in campaigns against animal abuse and GM. And participate in this year’s Earth First! summer gathering to learn more about active campaigns for environmental justice and animal rights, skill up, and get involved.

Corn in Mexico, where small-scale farmers are keeping the genetic diversity of the crop alive. Photo by ALAN DE LA CRUZ on Unsplash

The post Dystopian Farm: the UK dairy industry & its technofixes appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Telling the story of the search for the COVID-19 vaccines puts capitalism under the microscope. It is a story that helps us to zoom in on why the pharmaceutical industry is set for one of the biggest profit windfalls in its history. And it magnifies our view of the commanding role of the capitalist state in a process that the likes of Boris Johnson present as driven by corporate ingenuity and naked competition – but in reality is driven by our wealth and by scientific knowledge that is part of the commons.

As we get to the end of the story, we find out that the search for the vaccine is not really a search for a cure at all, but a search to avoid dealing with the causes of the virus.

A sustainable business model

In April 2018, long before COVID-19 emerged from the zoonotic swamp, a report by Goldman Sachs analysts proposed that providing a “one shot” cure for diseases could never be a “sustainable business model.” Noting the advances made in gene cell therapy and gene editing – advances that paved the way for the COVID-19 vaccine – they said (with more than a hint of regret): “such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies”.

The Goldman Sachs analysts were only saying what everybody in the drug business knows: there is much less money in preventative medicine and vaccines than there is in treatment for chronic conditions. Until this virus came along, it was much more profitable to keep people with chronic conditions ill than to actually cure them. And, as the Prime Minister rightly says, Big Pharma follows the money. In 2019, the global vaccines’ market size was $47 billion. Sales of just four ‘treatment’ drugs matched this volume of sales (Humira, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis; Keytruda, the cancer treatment; Revlimid, used to treat multiple myeloma and Opdivo, also a cancer treatment). Before 2020, the vaccine industry was a classic oligopoly: four big players accounted for about 85% of the market (GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Merck and Pfizer).

The concentration of power in the industry, and its constant benchmarking with the lower risk business model that shapes the rest of the industry explains why earlier coronaviruses SARS 1 and MERS had no vaccine. With both viruses, tests were initially conducted on animals but not on humans. As the virus died out, so did the research. The Ebola vaccine – largely funded by WHO aid – was finally approved in 2019, a full 6 years after the start of the epidemic in West Africa. The Zika virus is currently undergoing clinical trials, but no vaccine is expected on the market soon.

There can be little doubt that racial capitalism and geo-economics has shaped our response to this virus. Previous viruses did not threaten our economy. Contrast the costs of Ebola to West African countries (estimated at over $50 billion) and the costs of the 2015 Zika virus outbreak to Latin America and the Caribbean (estimated at $18 billion). The most advanced economies stand to lose at least 4.5% of GDP as a result of this pandemic, as cost to production that is estimated at $28 trillion. This is counted in the trillions. The COVID-19 vaccines were needed to save the people of the Global North (and of course our economic system).

Indeed, equity held by the richest investors jumped in value at key stages in the vaccines’ development. The first of the vaccine trials published hopeful results in early August. By the end of the month, the world’s stock markets were reporting the best August in decades. The ongoing recovery in shareholder value through the last quarter of 2020 encouraged by the imminent vaccine roll-out also saw hedge funds reporting the biggest gains in more than a decade.

Our vaccine

The vaccines developed to deal with COVID-19 have undoubtedly given us a unique springboard to develop other vaccines in future. Yet this does not make up for years of neglect. We started from a low knowledge base about COVID-19 precisely because the big four had calculated that developing vaccines for the earlier coronaviruses was not worth the portfolio risk.

Our earlier Vaccinating Capitalism report on the profits being made by the main vaccine producers shows how this time portfolio risk was taken out of the equation. The reason the COVID-19 vaccines arrived at such warp speed is that the risk model changed overnight. Indeed, the normal risks associated with vaccine development were almost completely removed from investors. First, research and development, combined with direct subsidies, were mobilised on an unprecedented scale. Second, governments used our money to place the biggest drug advance orders in history and remove all market risk from future sales. Those two things prompted an unprecedented single-purpose investment in the sector. This unprecedented investment will, of course, be followed by unprecedented profits.

The development of this vaccine is part of a vast system of public subsidy that deceives the public into thinking that it is private capital in the form of Big Pharma that saves us through its innovation. Yet perhaps the biggest subsidy to those companies is hidden.

Universities provide trained scientists, a foundation of knowledge that has been built up over hundreds of years. It is in universities that the rules for clinical research are developed, and it is university researchers who establish the system of peer review and publish results in academic journals. Universities make the largest social contribution to verifying and disseminating scientific breakthroughs. It is knowledge that we hold in common. Part of the ‘commons’ it may be, but in economic terms, this knowledge production counts as an ‘externality’: an invisible subsidy that never shows up on a corporate balance sheet.

The infrastructure that produced the vaccines was nurtured in publicly funded universities, in public institutes and in heavily subsidised private labs. When we recognise this, we realise that it is we who are saving Big Pharma from its failure to develop an effective vaccine against similar viruses in the first place.

Vaccinating Capitalism

Most infectious disease experts expect that new viral diseases resulting from zoonotic ‘spillover’ – moving from animals to humans – will become ever more frequent occurrences. SARS-Cov-19 is not the first case, and we are likely to face many more. There are difficult issues that we need to face regarding this unprecedented vaccination programme: how it allows governments to avoid tackling the root causes of SARS-Cov-2, and indeed may help weaken our defences against the next pathogen that spreads from animals to humans.

We know some of the main drivers of spillover. One is deforestation. New pathogens are released when land that has been left relatively un-touched is cleared for development and industrial use by humans. Once wild animals carrying those pathogens are displaced, the pathogens then need to maximise the opportunity to ‘leap’ from one species to another in a process of genetic drift. This is not an easy process. But, as writers like Rob Wallace have been warning us for years, large scale industrial farming can vastly increase the chances of a virus mutating into a form that can make the leap. Once it is in the human pool, it finds its most fertile conditions in closely packed workplaces like factories, warehouses and call centres.

The problem is that it is not just us who are being vaccinated but capitalism itself. The danger is that the vaccines will merely provide a short-term “technofix” which helps ensure the survival of the system that keeps on killing us.

The entire public funding effort – furlough, government loans, suspension of the normal regulatory rules – has had one primary aim: to keep corporations on life support. Some of our most damaging and irresponsible corporations have been kept alive by public funding, often in ways that have allowed them to sack workers, rip-off customers, and profit from intensifying poverty. Meanwhile, the Covid crisis (despite all the celebratory news about falling pollution levels) has also been used to weaken efforts against climate change. Corporations in Europe and North America have taken the opportunity to lobby hard – with some success – for environmental deregulation and further weakening of Paris Agreement targets.

The development of the vaccines will save many lives, but there is a price to pay. The profit-maximising, risk-minimising model ensures that we, not the corporations, will ultimately end up paying the financial costs. But there is an even higher social cost that might be paid. If we don’t deal with the root causes of the problem, and simply continue to reproduce the same uncontrolled conditions of capitalist development and industrial farming, then we will keep being exposed to more and more zoonotic pathogens long after we have got rid of this one.

The post Vaccinating Capitalism: corporate pharma raids the commons and leaves the root causes untreated appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Here we look at the three leading vaccines now approved in the UK and Europe: those made by BioNTech and Pfizer, Astra Zeneca and Oxford University, and Moderna. Just how much money are the companies behind them going to make? How have they been supported by the public sector? And whose pockets will the money end up in?

How much profit will they make from the vaccines this year?

BioNTech/Pfizer: estimated $4 billion profit, after sales of $15 billion. Pfizer says it already has orders for at least $15 billion worth of vaccines, at around $19 a shot. According to the Financial Times, the profit margin could be close to 30% this year. Unashamedly working to maximise profit, Pfizer is reportedly driving a hard bargain when negotiating sales with both richer and poorer countries.

Moderna: estimated $8 billion profit (i), after sales of $18.4 billion. Moderna says it is on track to produce at least 700 million pre-ordered vaccines in 2021. Moderna’s jabs are the most expensive, between $25 to $37 a shot and the company says the cost of producing its jabs will be as low as 20% of sales.

Oxford/AstraZeneca: unknown profit, after forecast sales of $6.4 billion in 2021. It is selling at the cheapest price (for now) and they have promised to produce at cost without making a profit “during the pandemic”. But what does that really mean? One leaked contract seen by the Financial Times suggests they could declare the pandemic over and hike prices at any time from July. And AstraZeneca’s contract with Oxford University reportedly allows the company to make as much as 20% on top of the cost of manufacturing the jabs. In another sign of the limits of the “at cost” pledge, poorer countries including Bangladesh, South Africa and Uganda all appear set to pay more for the vaccine than the EU.

NB: The vaccines are being bought by governments around the world in advance bulk orders. Those profit figures, therefore, come overwhelmingly from sales to public authorities. As we see below, governments also massively subsidised the vaccines’ development. So the public sector is paying twice over: first to fund research, next to buy the results at inflated prices.

What about future years?

This is anyone’s guess. Given the amount of vaccines in development, competition may keep costs down. But if some prove more effective than others, and COVID-19 jabs become a regular event with annual boosters as for flu vaccines, the profits could keep rolling in for years to come. And once the pandemic’s intensity dwindles, all companies may feel free to hike prices further. For example, Pfizer’s chief financial officer told analysts the current price is “not a normal price, like we typically get for a vaccine — $150, $175 per dose. Let’s go beyond a pandemic pricing environment, the environment we’re currently in: obviously, we’re going to get more on price”.

How much did the vaccines cost to develop?

Exact figures are corporate secrets, but it seems likely they each cost around $1 billion to develop. Initial research for a new epidemic vaccine may cost an average of $68 million – though the COVID-19 jabs were developed much quicker. But the main cost is running large scale “Phase 3” trials – for the COVID-19 vaccines these have been bigger than usual, with tens of thousands of volunteers.

How else will the companies benefit?

The vaccines are a massive PR coup. The companies have become household names, and in a good way. That’s quite a turnaround for an industry that was reviled like few others after decades of profiteering. Whether the vaccines could have been produced in a more accessible, fairer way is only now starting to enter public debate, at least in the UK.

The science that underpins the company’s COVID-19 vaccines may also be put to use to treat – and profit from – other diseases. Moderna hopes its mRNA technology can be used to treat cancer, the most lucrative pharma ‘market’. Vaccitech, mentioned above, is raising huge amounts from investors on the hope its COVID-19 tech can be used to treat hepatitis and MERS. Development of the science has likely been helped by ‘road-testing’ through the vaccine roll-out.

Who invented the vaccines?

BionNTech/Pfizer: Research was done by BioNTech, a German pharma research company. Pfizer came in as partner once the vaccine was ready for trials.

Moderna: The vaccine was “co-developed” by Moderna and US government scientists working for the National Institute of Health (NIH). There is some mystery over the exact roles of the NIH and Moderna, just who owns the intellectual property – and why the US government has apparently allowed Moderna to keep all the profits.

Oxford/AstraZeneca: Oxford University scientists at its Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccines Group, led by Professors Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill.

The companies’ spin presents the COVID-19 vaccines as a triumph for corporate science. In fact only one of the three leading vaccines, the BionNTech/Pfizer one, was developed by the private sector (making money from the inventions of others is a classic big pharma play – read our explainer here). Also: all the teams benefited from initial research by the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, which published the first genomic sequencing of the COVID-19 virus freely on the open source site virological.org.

Were there any plans to produce vaccines without Big Pharma profits?

Oxford first considered allowing a range of manufacturers to produce its vaccine without selling exclusive rights to any corporation. But, according to the Wall Street Journal, senior executives at the university, along with major funder the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, argued they couldn’t manage a “global roll-out” without the help of big pharma. The university initially entered talks with US pharma giant Merck, before eventually signing with AstraZeneca in April 2020. The deal involves a full license to produce and sell the vaccine in return for $90 million and a 6% share of future royalties, which the university says will be reinvested into medical research. Vaccitech Ltd, a private “spinout” company whose directors include Professors Gilbert and Hill, will get 24% of the university’s cut.

How much public subsidy did they get?

BioNTech/Pfizer: €465 million (around $550 million). Research was funded privately. But they received a €100 million development loan from the European Investment Bank, and a €365 million grant from the German government, to help with manufacturing.

Oxford/AstraZeneca: around $1.3 billion. The vaccine came out of long-term research at Oxford University funded by the UK government and others. The government contributed over £87 million more to develop the new vaccine in early 2020.ii The US added up to $1.2 billion more as part of its “Operation Warp Speed”.

Moderna: over $955 million. US government funding included: an undisclosed amount for phase 1 trials in March 2020; $483 million in April for phase 2 and the start of phase 3 trials; another $472 million to expand phase 3 trials in July. Moderna also got a $1 million donation from Dolly Parton.

As well as these research subsidies, the companies received huge pre-orders from governments even before their vaccines had been approved for use. The US government for example made massive $1.95 and $1.53 billion pre-orders of the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna jabs through its Operation Warp Speed.

Who will get the money?

Pfizer/BioNTech: Profits are split 50/50 between the two companies.

Shareholders will receive ‘dividends’ – cash paid out from company profits. Pfizer’s main shareholders are global investment funds: especially Vanguard Group (7.6%), State Street Global Advisors (5%), and BlackRock (4.9%). Run by some of the world’s richest, most powerful people, such as Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, between them this “giant three” control approximately $20 trillion of the world’s assets. Meanwhile, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla made headlines selling £4.2 million of Pfizer shares the day it announced its vaccine worked.

BioNTech is generally presented as a rags-to-riches success story for two immigrant doctors, the husband and wife team of Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci. The vaccine has made them billionaires. But the company’s main owners, who owned around 50% last year, are the biotech investor twins Thomas and Andreas Struengmann. They made their first billions from generic medicine company Hexal they set up in the 1980s, then sold to Novartis in 2005.

Moderna: Shareholders include chairman Noubar Afeyan (14% share at start of pandemic), CEO Stéphane Bancel (9%), and professors Timothy Springer (Harvard) and Robert Langer (MIT). They have suddenly gone from directors of a loss-making company to multi-millionaires. Moderna shares have massively increased in value during the pandemic and Bancel in particular has sold off chunks of his holdings in recent months, taking out millions in cash. Moderna listed on the stock exchange in 2018 and its biggest institutional investor is Scottish investment fund Baillie Gifford, which has been buying up more shares recently and now has over 11%. The US giants Vanguard and BlackRock are next, with 5.7% and 4.1% each. One mystery over the Moderna vaccine is if any money will go back to the US government who “co-developed” and funded it.

Oxford/AstraZeneca: AstraZeneca, headquartered in London, is a global megacorp owned by the same big investment funds as Pfizer and others. At the end of 2020 its three biggest owners were BlackRock (7.5%), Wellington Management (5.2%) and Capital Group (4.3%).

According to the Wall Street Journal, Oxford University stands to get 6% of future royalty payments. 24% of those will be passed on to Vaccitech Ltd, a “spinout” private company whose directors include vaccine researchers Professors Gilbert and Hill. They each own around 5% of Vaccitech’s shares. The main shareholder (46%) is an investment company called Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), set up by the university to channel capital into its spinout businesses. OSI has numerous shareholders besides the university itself – including Google Ventures, Huawei, Chinese pharma company Fosum (which also owns shares in Moderna), the sultanate of Oman, as well as banks and private equity funds.

Could it have been different?

The initial research that sequenced the COVID-19 genome and kick-started the vaccine race was published open source, free for all to use. Imagine if vaccine research was also published openly and without patents, so that all manufacturers, including in the global south, could produce what they need at cost price. How many lives could that save? But that would threaten the profits and property rights of some of the world’s most powerful companies and investors.

The post Vaccine Capitalism: a run-down of the huge profits being made from COVID-19 vaccines appeared first on Corporate Watch.

With some of them becoming household names in the UK with the mass vaccine roll-out, we have made this short guide to help people understand the industry and just how it makes money from our health (see also: our breakdown here of the profits big pharma companies are set to make from the COVID-19 vaccines).

1) Follow profit, not need

One of the biggest problems with a system that directs medical research towards profits rather than needs is that R&D funding is channelled to those products that can make pharma companies the most money. The best prospects are drugs targeted at patients who are high-value and who will use the drugs long term. Best of all are patients in the US, where prices are highest, and with chronic conditions requiring repeat prescriptions. Or, as in the case of opioids like Oxycontin, where the drugs are highly addictive. On the other hand, one-shot vaccines for epidemics that mainly affect poorer countries are the classic example of a bad business prospect. Thus vaccine research was relatively neglected until last year – when COVID-19 suddenly became a rich country issue, and state funding poured in.

2) Patent everything

Pharma companies hold patents – licenses guaranteeing their “intellectual property” rights – on new medicines. This means no one else is allowed to produce the drug without their permission for the life of the patent, which is 20 years in most countries.

The theory of free market capitalism is that if one company makes high profits, then others will come in and make the same thing but cheaper, pushing down prices and profits. But the pharma industry is no competitive market. Patents mean that pharma companies have legal monopolies on particular drugs: because no other company can undercut them, they can set high prices and make big profits.

The intellectual property system is enforced by governments worldwide under the TRIPS agreement, which is one of the key documents of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Some states are more ardent enforcers than others. The US is particularly well-known as a strong defender of companies’ intellectual property; the EU is not far behind (see this recent report by Corporate Europe Observatory).

Governments including India and South Africa, along with NGOs such as Medécins Sans Frontières, have called for vaccine patents to be waived during the COVID-19 pandemic. This could allow poorer countries to start manufacturing their own vaccines at cost price – rather than wait until 2023 for pharma corporations to meet their orders. The idea is being strongly opposed by the US, EU, UK and other rich countries.

3) Price much, much higher than costs

How do pharma industry supporters justify a system that denies affordable drugs to billions of people? The argument is that this is the only way to cover research and development (R&D) cost for new drugs. The main US industry lobby group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PHRMA) says: “On average, it takes 10-15 years and costs $2.6 billion to develop one new medicine, including the cost of the many failures.” Without patents, they say, rivals could just copy their recipes and no one would ever bother to develop new medicines.

Drug companies on average spend about 20% of all their sales revenue on R&D.ii This is indeed high compared to other industries: only the aviation and space industry is more R&D intensive. But even so, sales cover costs many times over. Once drugs are on the production line, the actual manufacturing costs are tiny compared to often sky-high prices (unlike spacecraft, which are quite expensive to produce). Which explains that 20% profit margin.

Insulin usually costs less than $6 a vial to make, but sells for as much as $275 in the US (one example given by the campaign group Patients for Affordable Drugs). In Europe, pharma giant Gilead charged an average of €55,000 for a 12 week Hepatitis C treatment – when pills cost less than €1 per pill to manufacture. Such extreme examples illustrate a general pattern. One academic study found US pharma companies have an average 71% “gross profit” margin on drug sales – the money they make from a drug after the cost of producing it, but before company-wide costs such as marketing, taxes or executive bonuses.

4) Minimise risk

The pharma companies argue they have to bear the risk of developing experimental drugs that never make it to market. For example, the average cost of a new cancer drug has been estimated at $648 billion. The $2.6 billion figure cited from PHRMA above is actually a “risk weighted” estimate which “includes the cost of many failures”. If a pharma company invents 10 drugs costing $260 million each, but only one gets approved, then it has cost $2.6 billion overall to produce one it can sell.

Except that isn’t what happens. The reality is that major pharma companies only “invent” a handful of the drugs they patent and sell. In 2019, PHRMA’s member companies only spent $13 billion on preclinical research – most of their R&D spending goes on later stage development trials, after drugs have been discovered. An analysis of two Big Pharma giants shows that Pfizer only developed 10 out of 44 best-selling drugs “in house” (23%) – and Johnson & Johnson only developed 2 out of 18 (11%). The “innovation” largely happens in university and government labs, or in those of smaller research companies.

And a lot of it is state-funded. The US National Health Institutes, the main (but not the only) government medical research body, gives $39.2 billion a year to universities, medical schools and other research organisations.

Once the drugs have been found, the pharma giants step in – to buy up a license, or a whole company – once the drug has already proved itself through initial tests. (See also: recent US report on this.) The COVID-19 vaccines are classic examples.

5) Lobby, lobby, lobby

The pharma industry is powerful, with a lot of friends in high places. In the US, the country with the world’s highest drug prices, pharma spends more than any other industry on lobbying. Over 22 years pharma companies and industry groups have spent $4.45 billion on lobbying US politicians – almost twice the amount of the next highest spending industry, insurance. According to OpenSecrets, the industry has over 1,450 lobbyists working for it, 66% of whom are former government employees. And this is just the most public, officially declared, face of pharma’s political influence – it just scratches the surface of a grubby world of political donations, board positions, “revolving doors”, and more.

A report by Corporate Europe Observatory details how the EU has become a “complacent or complicit” tool defending pharma property rights. The price tag seems to be cheaper in Brussels: the top ten pharma companies spent up to €16 million on lobbying there in 2019. In the UK, stories have emerged such as the industry funding patient groups to help lobby for new drug treatments; or NHS England commissioning research for its purchasing strategy from a lobbying group funded by the industry.

And of course, these governments are also major big pharma customers: they pay out billions of their taxpayers’ pounds to buy the companies’ drugs.

Some further reading:

Bad Pharma – Ben Goldacre. Very detailed survey of pharma industry malpractice, particularly looking at issue of who trial results are systematically fiddled.

Pharma – Gerald Posner (2020). A journalistic history of the pharma industry (mainly US) and its crimes.

US Government Accountability Office (2017) report on US pharma industry, gives a useful overview of main issues.

Patients for Affordable Drugs – US campaign group

Corporate Europe Observatory – reports on pharma industry politics in Europe

Notes

The post Vaccine Capitalism: five ways big pharma makes so much money appeared first on Corporate Watch.

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The growing pro-GM stance expressed by mainstream media and politicians, together with the growing number of new research trials, may be worrying signs that GM is on its way back to the UK.

This year will see the first-ever open-field trial of GM wheat, conducted by the Rothamsted Research centre in Hertfordshire. The trial is the first open trial of synthetic genes for a commercial crop in the UK. And while it represents a new phase in the struggle between food democracy and corporate control of food in the UK, corporate interests in GM crops continue to grow worldwide. According to the 2011 Synthesis Report, the real reason why the industry continues to promote GMOs is due to the patenting of seeds, with seed companies continuing to flourish and extend their monopoly over seeds through patents, mergers and cross-licensing arrangements. The report maps the numerous companies involved in the seed industry.

New trial

In March this year, Rothamsted Research planted a new GM wheat trial designed to repel aphids. It contains genes for antibiotic resistance and an artificial gene ‘most similar to a cow’. The trial site is under 24-hour security, partly in anticipation that anti-GM activists may attempt to destroy the crop. The laboratory work and trial will cost £800,000, with £120,000 to be spent on security. Funding is being provided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), which has provided over £1.28 million in public money via grants.

Campaign group GM Freeze cites numerous reasons why the trail should be opposed, from using genes from animal origin to cross contamination, from risks to wildlife to the fact that there are alternative solutions to the problem of aphids. According to group, the director of Rothamsted Research, prof. Maurice Maloney, has spent his entire career on GM technology and was previously Chief Scientific Officer at SemBioSys Genetics Inc, a biotechnology company he founded in 1994 in Canada.

Wrong attitude

In February 2012, the British Science Association commissioned Populus to conduct a GM Survey to find out what the public’s attitudes towards GM are now. GM Freeze argues that many of the questions in the survey were “misleading” and that they provided participants with false information about GM crops. For example, the survey claimed that Golden Rice, which is genetically modified to produce beta carotene, can tackle vitamin A deficiency, even though this has not been proven and the crop has not received food safety approvals yet.

The survey results have been reported very differently by mainstream media, with The Guardian running such headlines as ‘Public concern over GM food has lessened, survey shows’ and ‘Should the UK now embrace GM food?’. Meanwhile the Daily Mail, which has traditionally been a sceptic of GM, ran with the headline ‘Backing for GM food has halved since the 1990s with one in three Brits now opposed to it’.

The actual results of the survey and the variety of interpretations given to them clearly demonstrate the continuation of the contested nature of GM in the UK, which could be an advantage for campaigners, many of who spent years resisting the introduction of GM in the late 1990s and early 2000s. What is certainly clear is that there has not been a huge increase in public support for GM. Indeed, Brain Wynne, a leading researcher on the economic and social aspects of genomics at Lancaster University, wrote to The Guardian in March this year to complain about its misleading headline, pointing out that the percentage of the public who say they agree that GM food “should be encouraged” has dropped by nearly a half over the last ten years, which is the opposite of what the headline claims.

Dialogue?

In a recent appeal video, Rothamsted Research appealed to campaigners not to take direct action against the trail and asked for ‘dialogue’. One of the campaign groups that have has also agreed to engage in dialogue with Rothamsted is Take The Flour Back, though it is also planning a mass direct action against the trail on 27th May. Take The Flour Back has written an open letter to Rothamsted saying they wish to engage in dialogue so that “both sides of the debate have an equal chance to hear and understand each others’ perspectives.” On Thursday 17th May, a public debate about the issue was hosted by the BBC’s Newsnight programme.

Such dialogues are often used by corporations as a ‘holding tactic’ or as a way of ‘pacifying’ activists. Those who support GM have simply ignored public and scientific objections made to this new trail before it started. Objections continue to be made, however, with one group of MPs, The Environmental Audit Committee, calling on the government to refrain from licensing GM crops until their benefits have been proved. The committee last week released a report questioning the government’s support for GM technology.

For more on this, see Corporate Watch’s analysis of ‘upstream engagement’ in relation to corporate technologies, which is a type of top-down engagement with ‘the public’, facilitated by academics on behalf of government and the industries involved in the development of new technologies.

The post Is this the UK comeback of GM? appeared first on Corporate Watch.

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In February, a senior scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture, Don Huber, sent an emergency warning to US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, regarding a new plant pathogen found in Roundup Ready GM soybean and corn.

The pathogen, which is ‘new to science’, may be responsible for high rates (around 20%) of infertility and spontaneous abortions in livestock (as high as 45%) [1, 2], as well a whole array of other environmental problems, such as serious pervasive diseases in plants. Huber argued that it should be treated as an emergency, because it could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets, as well as disruption of domestic food and animal feed supplies.

The letter appeared to have been written before Vilsack announced his decision to authorise unrestricted commercial planting of GM alfalfa on 1st February, in order to convince the Secretary of Agriculture to impose a moratorium on Roundup Ready (RR) crops, instead of deregulation. Huber wrote in the letter that he has been studying plant pathogens for more than 50 years and that scientists are now seeing an unprecedented trend of increases in diseases and disorders in plants and animals, meaning this pathogen may be key to understanding this trend and solving the problem.

This could be the worst problem yet to be seen with genetic engineering. Scientists have been warning for years [3, 4] about the unintended creation of new pathogens through assisted horizontal gene transfer and recombination.

References

[1] “Researcher: Glyphosate (Roundup) or Roundup Ready Crops May Cause Animal Miscarriages”, Jill Richardson, La Vida Locavore, 18 February 2011 www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/4523
[2] “Researcher: Glyphosate (Roundup) or Roundup Ready Crops May Cause Animal Miscarriages”, 18 February 2011, http://farmandranchfreedom.org/gmo-miscarriages
[3] Ho MW. Genetic Engineering Dream of Nightmare? The Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business, Third World Network, Gateway Books, MacMillan, Continuum, Penang, Malaysia, Bath, UK, Dublin, Ireland, New York, USA, 1998, 1999, 2007 (reprint with extended Introduction). www.i-sis.org.uk/genet.php
[4] www.nongmoreport.com/articles/jan10/scientists_find_negative_impacts_of_GM_crops.php

The post New harmful pathogen found in Roundup Ready GM crops appeared first on Corporate Watch.

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Controversial GM plans that will allow genetically modified crops to enter the UK food chain without the need for regulatory clearance are expected to be approved by parliament this week. The EU plans to permit the importing of animal feed containing traces of unauthorised GM crops, and the UK government intends to back the EU on this. At the moment, animal feed containing GM has to be authorised by European regulators, but this week it is expected that a vote will overturn the EU’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy.

In the UK

The GM industry and its lobby are clearly pushing for GM in animal feed as part of a longer strategy to promote and normalise the presence of the technology, thereby opening up UK and European food markets and ensuring GM-free food becomes an impossibility. Such a situation would also benefit US feed exporters. Campaign groups such as Friends of the Earth Europe have questioned the legality of the EU’s plan, yet European regulators are arguing that food security is still possible if animal feed contains no more than 0.1% traces of GM.

This percentage game is a dangerous one, of course, because as soon as we start to descend down this slippery slope, it will become impossible to resist GM on general political and environmental principles, such as food sovereignty. The industry’s strategy is to slowly introduce GM in this way by claiming it is such a small amount, and only in animal feed, that there is no need to worry so much. This will have the effect of normalising the presence of GM in our food chain and will open up the UK and Europe for more and more GM imports, and eventually cultivation of GM in the UK.

And globally

The situation globally is looking much the same as in the UK and the EU, if not worse. Arguments are being made that there is already so much GM around that it has to be an essential element to any ‘sustainable’ global agriculture plan. However, transgenic crops only covered about 4% of the global cropland area in 2004 (see the IAASTD report below). The case is usually framed in terms of the challenge of feeding a growing population, which is such a massive issue that we must use all available techniques, even though research has shown that small-scale farming methods, without technologies like GM, are more appropriate to deal with one of the main challenges we face in the coming decades.

The Final Report of the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures Project was delivered on 24th January on behalf of Government by Sir John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the government. The report can be found here.

The report was anticipated by those interested to see how it was going to differ from the 2009 report the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), titled ‘Agriculture at a Crossroads’. This was a global scientific assessment of the future of agriculture initiated in 2002 as a global consultation process, sponsored by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and involving the private sector and NGOs. Other sponsors included the Global Environment Facility (GEF), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Health Organization (WHO), and the governments of Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, US and UK, as well as the European Commission. The IAASTD was approved by the UK government and 57 others (although not by Australia, Canada, and the U.S.). The report can be found here.

The IAASTD report

The objectives of the report were “to assess the impacts of past, present and future agricultural knowledge, science and technology on the reduction of hunger and poverty, improvement of rural livelihoods and human health and equitable, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable development.”

One of the main themes of the report was biotechnology and the environmental and human health impacts of transgenic crops. The report did not rule out the use of GM as part of a global agricultural strategy, yet confirmed the proposals of small-scale farmers movements, such as La Via Campesina, for ways to secure future food and realise food sovereignty. It found that small-scale, agro-ecological and organic production methods protected from damaging globalised markets and based on local knowledge, and women’s skills especially, were the way forward to tackle problems of hunger, equality and the environment now and in the next 40 years.

However, the IAASTD report assessed different possible future scenarios and concluded:

“Overall, it is likely that the elimination of a powerful tool like transgenesis would slow but not stop the pace of agricultural research and improvement. As a result, humanity would likely be more vulnerable to climatic and other shocks and to increased natural resource scarcity.”

It acknowledged the risks of the privatisation of the plant breeding system and the concentration of market power in input companies. Yet, it also made claims about the effectiveness of biotechnologies being augmented by integrating local and tacit knowledge.

The Foresight report

This report, as expected, offered no additional proposals to the much more detailed IAASTD report, while costing a lot of public money to carry out. Caroline Spelman, MP Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Andrew Mitchell, MP Secretary of State for International Development, were involved in preparing the report. In June 2010, Corporate Watch reported on Spelman, who used to run the biotechnological company Spelman, Cormack & Associates, when she first came into this role in 2010. Mitchell is part of DFID, which has a long history of ‘dodgy development’, as a www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=3655“>series bearing this title recently published by Corporate Watch demonstrates very well.

Unsurprisingly, the Foresight report advocated the use of GM technologies more strongly than the IAASTD report:

“New technologies (such as the genetic modification of living organisms and the use of cloned livestock and nanotechnology) should not be excluded a priori on ethical or moral grounds, though there is a need to respect the views of people who take a contrary view.”

The report claims that there are ‘real sustainable gains’ to be made by combining biotechnological, agronomic and agro-ecological approaches to agriculture. It is critical of the small number of companies that have come to dominate the global food supply chain and the corresponding concentration of corporate power, but then goes on to say:

“However, there does not seem to be an argument for intervention to influence the number of companies in each area or how they operate – provided that the current numbers of major companies in each area and region of the food system were not to contract to a level where competition was threatened, and provided that all organisations adhere to high international standards of corporate governance.”

The Foresight report claims that the spread of Western farming methods, the expansion of seed companies and large corporations continuing to buy up farms in the global south, is part of the ‘solution’, whereas the IAASTD report was much more critical.

Mainstream newspapers, like the Guardian and the Independent, seem to have uncritically accepted the claims of the Foresight report, following the technofixation ideology that it espouses (see here and here, for example). Interestingly, the Daily Mail, following on from its track record of criticising the potential onslaught of GM the last time round, has been more critical, writing on 6th February that investment in farming is essential, but the “right investment”, not large GM companies controlling more and more land in the global south.

The way forward

Both reports promote GM technologies, though in different ways and to different degrees. The Foresight report’s conclusions seem to have particularly been made in order to force acceptance of GM foods in the UK. However, if we want our global food strategy to involve the most productive, just and sustainable agricultural methods, then the best way forward is to base our food system on the biodiverse and ecological practices of the majority of small-scale, local food providers. This will ensure we maximise ecosystem functions in every locality, a conclusion based on first-hand experience over more than 40 years of the ability of small-scale food providers to grow enough food for themselves, their communities and provide excess for the market. We need to protect the rights of these farmers to continue with such practices free from the corporate menace that is GM.

The post Update on the GM industry in the UK and beyond appeared first on Corporate Watch.

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Genetically Modified (GM) crops are on the rise within the EU. In the UK, the coalition government have declared an intention to be the most pro-GM government this country has ever seen. Corporate Watch reported on the implications of these EU level changes in 2010. Here we present Organised Irresponsibility a new pamphlet on GM in Germany, and some information on past and present anti-GM organising in the UK.

In July 2010 the European Commission (EC) approved changes to GM cultivation regulations by allowing national governments to decide whether or not to permit GM cultivation within their borders. For the last 12 years there has been a virtual freeze on GM farming throughout the EU. The changes are being justified with the argument that it will make it easier for states to ban GM crops on their own soil, even if this will happen in exchange for less power over what other states decide to do, meaning easier authorisation for GM at the EU level overall. GM crops can now in theory be banned in individual states on the grounds of prevention of contamination, but it may take up to two years for prevention on non-scientific grounds to be implemented due to legislative processes.

There is a history of successful resistance to GM in the UK, which Corporate Watch was heavily involved with. Activists are now preparing for the next phase of corporate and governmental attempts to enforce GM.

A brief history of resistance to GM in the UK

Since the mid 1990s, Britain has seen effective and sustained campaigns of non-violent direct action against GM crops. This has ranged from crop pulling to office occupations to supermarket blockades, and involved a remarkably wide range of people. With widespread public support, campaigners succeeded in significantly holding up the introduction of GM crops and GM foods into Britain.

In 1996 a handful of multinational corporations planned to flood the UK with GM crops. The corporations did not expect any opposition, and it seemed like they would be successful in introducing unlabelled GM soya and maize products into supermarkets, increasing GM crop trials, and initiating the commercial growing of GM crops. However, by 1998 the GM industry was suffering due to general public outrage and widespread rejection of GM crops. Protests, letter-writing, supermarket actions, lobbying, and information events erupted all over the country, but GM products were still being imported into the country and openly grown in fields. At this point, people decided to take non-violent direct action (NVDA) to remove GM crops from fields by physically pulling them up.

The first ‘crop-pulling’ direct actions took place in 1998, and in the years from 1999-2000 37 different GM trials were damaged or destroyed. The GM industry wanted to avoid bad PR, which meant the majority of cases never came to court. A combination of widespread public opposition and direct action has meant that over the last decade the GM industry has remained on the backfoot in the UK. However, with the recent changes at EU level, it may once again become possible for a corporate onslaught.

A more detailed history and further information is available at Stop GM.

A GM case study in Germany: organised irresponsibility

Germany has also seen a successful anti-GM movement. However, recent repression reveals that the EU has well-founded concerns about widespread opposition to GM. The authors of a recent pamphlet – Organised Irresponsibility about the revolving doors between the GM industry and the German government – are being taken to court and the distribution of the pamphlet has been banned by the German state. Inge Broer, a GM researcher and manager of the organisation FINAB, which arranges GM experiments in Germany, labelled Organised Irresponsibility a “booklet full of fabrications”.

Corporate Watch and others have translated Organised Irresponsibility, which can be downloaded from the Corporate Watch website.

The Organised Irresponsibility pamphlet explains the complex inter-relationships between GM corporations, government departments and other institutions and networks of people in Germany. Manifestations of corruption, revolving doors and ‘old boys networks’ can be seen to be occurring on a massive scale, but there are also many other mechanisms employed to ensure that the GM industry is maintained and able to expand. Fake pro-GM demonstrations have been staged with paid ‘protesters’, and front organisations with pro-environment sounding names set up for particular functions of industrial expansion, such as pushing a particular GMO through the legal framework. These organisations then serve to entrench the inter-connections between all the groups: lobbyists, corporations, government departments, and powerful individuals who fund scientific research.

The Organised Irresponsibility pamphlet details many individual instances of institutional power dynamics and profiles key individuals active in Germany. Yet, the case of the German state and GM in recent years sheds light on similar situations unfolding in other European countries as the GM ‘debate’ returns following changes at the EU level. This is especially useful at the moment, because it is likely that the methods by which new technologies will be introduced and by which older technologies will be re-introduced will be more complex than when GM was first attempted in Europe. Understanding how these processes work means people will be better equipped to respond to so-called technological ‘advances’ on a structural level.

GM resistance in 2011

Activists are responding to the renewed threat of GM in the UK. A gathering has been organised for Saturday 22nd January in London to update on the situation in the UK, and to plan strategy and actions. Here is the event call out:

You are warmly invited to join other activists and researchers for an anti-GM update and strategy session in London on Saturday 22nd January 2011. This day long national gathering will bring together a wide range of people campaigning on GM related issues, from climate activists to NGO representatives, community food growers to beekeepers.

This is the perfect opportunity to get up to speed with the latest in GM developments, and explore how you and your organisation can be part of the UK’s emerging radical land and food movement. The day starts off with briefing sessions designed to give you clear data and an authoritative context on issues that are likely to be stories in 2011. UN experts on agro ecology will also be presenting research into alternatives.

The afternoon will focus on sharing and developing campaign ideas and networking. This will include a strategic discussion on how we can effectively counter misinformation and lobbying, as well evolving new and existing campaigns.

GM: Gathering Momentum is organised by Stop GM in conjunction with the Genetic Engineering Network. The free event will be hosted in London from 10 – 6pm, and lunch will be provided.

Please contact us for a detailed programme and registration form: info@stopgm.org.uk

For more information see: www.stopgm.org.uk

The post The ‘Organised Irresponsibility’ of GM corporations and a new generation of GM activism. appeared first on Corporate Watch.

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On 13th July the European Commission (EC) approved changes to genetic modification (GM) cultivation regulations by allowing national governments to decide whether to permit GM cultivation within their borders. For the last 12 years, there has been a virtual freeze on GM farming throughout the EU. The changes are being justified by the argument that it will make it easier for states to ban GM crops on their own soil, even if this will happen in exchange for having less say over what other states decide to do, meaning easier authorisation for GM at the EU level. GM crops can now in theory be banned in individual states on the grounds of prevention of contamination, but it may take up to two years for prevention on non-scientific grounds to be implemented due to legislative processes.

The Green Party has been pushing for less centralised decision making regarding GM, because, they argue, when countries are able to decide for themselves whether or not to grow GM, it will be easier for GM critics to make national politicians accountable for their decisions regarding GM. The changes also require that any deliberate release of GM organisms into the environment would have to be adopted in co-decision between member states and the commission.

However, the reality is that these changes are facilitating the GM agenda by doing away with regulations. What could be, superficially, seen as a step forward for individual states may result in a worse overall situation as the co-called deadlock on GM cultivation is lifted and biotechnology companies are permitted to make moves into specific countries. This will make it harder for those states who want to ban GM, because biotechnology lawyers will almost certainly attempt to overturn bans. In addition, within the countries that allow GM initially, it will become harder for individual farmers who want to remain organic or GM-free, especially those within countries with little or no regulation like Spain.

The EC changes will enable quicker authorisations of GM trials, with countries placated with the promise of being able to ban specific GM varieties afterwards. These field trials are an indispensable intermediate step in gaining approval to grow and harvest as yet unauthorised varieties of GM crops in the EU. Also, it is currently unclear whether member states will be able to reject GM that is authorised at the commission level and, if they are allowed, whether they would have to justify their rejection to the EC.

These changes will enable immediate benefit to GM multinationals, which will press for greater GM plantings in pro-GM states, such as Spain and the Netherlands, which may cause illegal GM plantings in countries with inadequate GM control mechanisms, such as countries in Eastern Europe. Consequently, this could lead to a situation whereby those EU countries which do not have GM crops growing on their land are subject to massive diplomatic and commercial pressure to do so. The changes may also shine a green light to the rest of the world to loosen GM regulation in their own jurisdictions. China is currently deciding whether to adopt genetically modified strains of rice, its staple crop.

One of the Con-Dem government’s first acts was to approve a trial of GM potatoes in Norfolk, so where does this leave the resistance movement in the UK? There have been other field trails in the UK and most of them have been destroyed by activists. This led Leeds university to spend around £100,000 on security for a trial they recently conducted so that it would not be trashed. The trial went ahead, but the necessary security costs shows why commercial GM research is not currently viable in the UK.

Global opposition to GM thankfully continues. On 12th July, Activists in Catalonia, Spain, sabotaged two experimental maize trials belonging to Syngenta. The Spanish State represents approximately 80% of the surface area of GMOs harvested in Europe, sowing more than 75,000 hectares in 2009, and hosting 42% of the experimental GMO field trials in the EU in recent years. Syngenta are the third largest seed corporation in the world, after Monsanto and Dupont. In the twelve years since GM maize crops were first planted in Catalonia, there have been repeated cases of contamination of other crops, which shows that the supposed coexistence between GM and non-GM crops is impossible. The proliferation of GM crops in Catalonia has led to the extinction of some varieties of traditional wheat and a 95% reduction in the cultivation of organic maize between 2002 and 2008. Resistance, such as that in Spain, may be more important than ever since the EC policy change.

One argument that is now being used by those who are pro-GM is that GM has to be part of the solution to feed the world due to the rising global population and climate change. For example, Richard Girling (who won the Environmental Journalism of the Year award last year, which is interestingly sponsored by Peugeot) wrote an article in the Sunday Times magazine on 27th June, which argued for GM as a necessary and green solution to feeding the world. The argument that GM must play a key role in ending world hunger is based on countless falsities, not least the fact that hunger is not caused by a lack of food but by poverty, and no corporate technology is going to address that fundamental issue. In addition, GM crops do not provide higher yields. It is important that people continue to resist such false claims about GM and continue to fight for self-sufficient food production.

At the Earth First summer gathering in the UK this summer there will be action planning as to what we can do to resist the spread of GM in the UK and beyond.

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