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'Terminator' engineering: A threat to humanity

A handful of global corporations are on the verge of controlling the future of humanity by replacing naturally-grown food with genetically modified (GM) products.

They are dabbling in an experimental way with the building blocks of life itself, taking genes from one organism and grafting them on to another to produce unnatural plants and food. In effect, industry is taking control of evolution.

Corporations like Monsanto, a chemicals company that now dominates GM products, are so powerful that they virtually own the Clinton government.

Monsanto funded Bill Clinton's election campaign and finances social security programmes. In return they have a green light to conduct a vast experiment on nature and people. They have even developed "terminator" seeds, which self-destruct after a crop is gathered to ensure that farmers have to buy afresh.

Experimental trials of GM crops are going on in more than 100 locations in Britain. Monsanto and other GM companies are right at the heart of the New Labour government too. Tony Blair says GM food is safe, and that opponents are irrational.

Lord Sainsbury, the science minister, has had connections with GM patents and companies. We are told that there is no "conflict of interest" even though he sits on a Cabinet committee looking into GM.

Scientists who cannot get the funds to do research unless they can demonstrate its commercial worth are brought under great pressure to back GM. Many of them work for Monsanto. Yet many emininent scientists have stated publicly that GM is in its infancy, and no one is certain of what engineering different organisms together will produce.

Dr Vanana Shiva, director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Ecology in Delhi, says: "The problems with the genetic revolution developed right from the start. Twenty-five years ago, molecular biologists evolved the tools of genetic engineering in labs, working with organisms designed not to survive in an open environment.

"Today, long before the science of molecular biology has matured, global corporations have rushed to the market, applying the tools of genetic engineering to whole systems of agriculture and food production." Gene transfers lead to unpredictable outcomes because plants and organisms are continuously changing, he adds.

The next step is that the genetic engineering industry wants to patent the genes used in their manufacture of new organisms. By claiming ownership of genes they are gradually taking control of life itself.

All living things could become profit making products, and multi-national companies – many of them chemical giants – will rule the very foundations of society – agriculture, food production, and the content of the very foods we eat.

What the GM issue shows is that the multi-nationals are a law unto themselves. They cannot be brought under control because the corporations are more powerful than governments. Their first consideration is to their shareholders, not the environment. Calls for a moratorium on GM food or for supermarkets to resist miss this essential point. Even eminent academics who once backed Thatcher, realise this. John Gray, professor of political thought at the London School of Economics, says by signing up to global treaties on free trade, the British government cannot interfere with GM trade.

"These treaties have had the effect of putting issues such as the import of genetically modified foods beyond the reach of democratically elected national governments," says Gray. "In the best of circumstances, the problems surrounding new genetic technologies would be difficult. Under the current regime of global laissez-faire, they are practically insoluble."

If governments are powerless in the face of the multi-nationals, as they are, then the whole social structure is rotten and needs replacing. Any other approach is self-defeating.

We are talking about a transfer of power from the multi-nationals to the people who work in them and consume their products. We are advocating a new state based on popular democracy to replace the useless parliamentary talking-shop.

The Movement for a Socialist Future argues, therefore, for the reorganisation of production for need not profit and the planned use of science in the interests of humanity. This is not a pipedream but a practical necessity, for in the hands of profit-greedy companies, genetic engineering has the potential to wipe out humanity.