1.Raven pontificates from his gilded perch
2.GMOs and Science: What Have We Learned - Peter Raven
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1.Raven pontificates from his gilded perch

Last Friday Peter Raven, Pontifical Academician and Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, spoke at the US-Vatican conference, "Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperatives of Biotechnology."

Below is his address. It has been widely circulated via the AgBioView list of Prof CS Prakash, another of the speakers at the conference. In it Raven contrasts the rationality and scientific consensus found amongst supporters of the genetic engineering of food crops with the opposition which he characterises as "ideological", "unsupported", "harmful", "idiosyncratic", "scientifically unfounded", "fanciful", "self-serving", "murky", "outrageous", "politically or economically motivated", "obscene" and immoral

Yet many of Raven’s own claims are at the least open to question. He tells his audience, for instance, that "Cotton is already a global success story, and those who cultivated GM cotton are clearly better off than ever before". Try telling that to farmers in Indonesia where Monsanto had to pull out, it was so unsuccessful. Recent press reports there say the Government has turned to a non-GM cotton alternative which is working well, although not supported with the aggressive hype that accompanied Monsanto’s GM cotton.

In India GM cotton has also been much hyped but has been the subject of a series of critical reports, with one State even declaring it "unfit for cultivation". Even in China, which is most often quoted as a success story, Prof Dayuan Xue has warned that GM crops have brought no "significant benefits" to China's many small farmers.

Raven is an expert in biodeversity and so gives much attention to the claimed benefits for biodiversity arising from GM. His principle claim, that GM increases production and so lessens the land required for cultivation, is simply an assumption unsupported by any evidence, and there is clearly no lack of evidence of the exact opposite.* Yet this assumption is critical to Raven's argument.
* http://ngin.tripod.com/farming.htm

He also claims that GMOs mean less chemicals hence more biodiversity (birds etc.) This is clearly a nonsense in terms of GM herbicide tolerant crops - the most widely grown GM crops - a point Raven studiously ignores athough he does take a side-swipe at "the British study of GM crops reported in 2003" which showed that "biodiversity was lower in the fields where GM crops were grown - because weed control was more effective there!" He seeks to ridicule this inconvenient piece of evidence, "No college of agriculture in the world teaches that it is better for productive agriculture to include more weeds". Curious then, that media coverage of Friday’s US-Vatican conference quoted CS Prakash as claiming for GM crops that: "you will have more friendlier insects on the farm, *far more weeds* and far more birds coming into your farm". (emphasis added)
(Vatican Urges Further Study of Genetically Engineered Food) http://www.voanews.com/mediastore/Sabina_Castelfranco_food_26sept04.rm

In other words, when weeds are considered important to biodiversity, GM crops are claimed to lead to "far more weeds", but when the research evidence shows GM crops actually lead to less, then no farmer in the world would want more of them!

Perhaps the least savoury aspect of Raven's address though is not its sophistry or the endless name calling, but its ludicrous attack on critics of this technology like the Catholic Institute of International Relations as paid agents of the European Union or its individual member nations! Of course, Raven has the sense to present this as an allegation, "If allegations that the European Union or individual nations are funding pressure groups such as Greenpeace or 'The Catholic Institute for International Relations' (not affiliated with the Vatican, and perhaps not officially with the Roman Catholic Church) are true, they clearly indicate a misuse of taxpayer funds to support ideological causes that are unsupported and harmful to the development of Europe and its individual countries".

The perjorative aside about the CIIR's lack of connection with the Catholic Church is also characteristic. Note how even CIIR's name is put in inverted commas. On fact, CIIR was founded by a Roman Catholic Cardinal to encourage a Christian spirit of resistance to Hitler, and to work towards a world order that would not be fascist. The Sword of the Spirit. CIIR has an episcopal adviser who provides a link with the Bishops' Conference, while governance is by a board whose chairman and vice chairman have to be Catholic, by constitution.
http://www.catholicsinpublicsquare.org/papers/fall2000commonweal/wilkins/wilkinspanel.htm

Raven also has Greenpeace in his sights and not for the first time. In May 2003, speaking at the Natural History Museum in London, Raven attacked Greenpeace over its opposition to GMOs, telling his audience, "Last month, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of America's most venerable and respected civil rights groups, confronted Greenpeace at a public event and accused it of "eco-manslaughter" through its support of international policies limiting development and the expansion of technology to the developing world's poor". In fact, the once respected CORE was hi-jacked during the 1970s by elements that have since used it as a Republican right pro-corporate lobby. Black American journalists Glen Ford and Peter Gamble describe CORE as "a tin cup outstretched to every Hard Right political campaign or cause that finds it convenient - or a sick joke - to hire Black cheerleaders". They also report how James Farmer, the former head of the original Congress of Racial Equality has publicly accused the man who took over CORE, Roy Innis, of turning "the organization into what Farmer called a 'shakedown' gang." These are Greenpeace's "respected" and "venerable" accusers.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=174

What really beggars belief, though, is the implication in last Friday's attack on CIIR that it is the paid mouthpiece of an undisclosed funder - in effect, a foreign power! As you will see, Raven fails to disclose anywhere in his address that the Missouri Botanical Garden, of which he is director, has received literally millions of dollars in funding from Monsanto. The Garden's multimillion-dollar research centre is actually called The Monsanto Center after its benefactor. And even an old friend of Raven's, the geneticist Wes Jackson, says of him, "In a certain sense he's a paid traveling salesman for Monsanto."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=191

Wes Jackson has also said, "'I just wish Peter was more reflective... The fact that living substance, germplasm, can become the property of a corporation is going to come at a cost. I think the boundaries of consideration need to be broader than Peter's willing to make them." In his Vatican address Raven, typically, makes only the most passing of references to Intellectual Property Rights.
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2.Today in AgBioView
www.agbioworld.org; September 25, 2004

* "Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperatives of Biotechnology."

"Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperatives of Biotechnology." The Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, September 24, 2004

GMOs and Science: What Have We Learned

Peter H. Raven, Pontifical Academician; Director, Missouri Botanical Garden, P.O. Box 299, St. Louis, MO63110, USA; [email protected] It is my pleasure today to present a summary of current scientific views of the potential positive and negative effects of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). My comments will be based primarily on the "Study Document on the Use of Ge