» WELCOME
» AN INTRODUCTION
» PROFILES
» LM WATCH
» CONTACT
» LOBBYWATCH LINKS
»


New USAID briefing - full text - recommended reading! (25/4/2005)

Here's the full text of the new briefing in full.

Highly recommended!

Best read online, if possible, for formatting of tables etc.
------

USAID: Making the world hungry for GM crops
http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=191

This briefing examines how the US government uses USAID to actively promote GM agriculture. The focus is on USAID's major programmes for agricultural biotechnology and the regions where these programmes are most active in parts of Africa and Asia[1]. These USAID programmes are part of a multi-pronged strategy to advance US interests with GM crops. Increasingly the US government uses multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements and high-level diplomatic pressure to push countries towards the adoption of many key bits of corporate-friendly regulations related to GM crops. And this external pressure has been effectively complimented by lobbying and funding from national and regional USAID biotech networks.

Introduction

In 1990, two Monsanto executives got in touch with Joel Cohen, the Senior Biotechnology Specialist for USAID (the US Agency for International Development).[2] Monsanto wanted USAID to help develop a GM crop for Africa that would give GMOs a good name. Cohen, who had come to the agency from the US seed industry, turned to USAID's most trusted research institute in Africa-- the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI). The three men set up a meeting with KARI and began to put their plan into action.

They decided to work on sweet potato, a crop neglected by seed companies and scientists but for which there were some promising GM applications being developed in the US. KARI had the perfect person for Monsanto to collaborate with - Florence Wambugu [3], a KARI scientist who had just completed a PhD programme on sweet potatoes.[4] Monsanto immediately hired Wambugu to work in the United States on a GM sweet potato resistant to the Sweet potato feathery mottle virus. Fourteen years later, it is pretty clear that Wambugu's sweet potatoes are far from ready for the fields of Kenya's farmers; in recent field studies the GM crop failed to resist the virus and underperformed the non-GM local varieties.[5]

But getting the GM sweet potato out to farmers was not the real intention anyway. The overriding goal was to open doors to GM, and in this it was a great success (see the box The Trojan Sweet Potato). Most importantly, the project served as a vehicle for driving forward a regulatory framework conducive to GM crops. And this is where USAID is making it's mark - getting Southern countries to set up the regulatory frameworks and the technical capacity that US corporations require to build-up global markets for their GM crops.[6]
***
Box: The Trojan Sweet Potato

There were multiple advantages to working with a specific GM crop like sweet potato. It opened up a long-term, direct collaboration between Monsanto and a Southern public research centre, in this case KARI, in which several scientists would be trained at Monsanto 's US headquarters. These scientists would end up forming a vocal domestic lobby with a personal stake in the GM debate. It was also an obvious source of public relations for Monsanto and other GM corporations. Here was a company "donating" its technology to African scientists in order to improve a subsistence crop in which it clearly had no financial interest.

Most important, though, was getting the relevant regulations on GM implemented. Before you can commercialise GM sweet potatoes, you have to field-test them, and for this you need regulations, or so the argument goes. The project thereby provided a way to side-step the larger question of whether there should be any introductions of GM crops and the critical questions about the merits and risks of the GM crop in question to proceed to the technical matter of how to "manage risk" in field tests. Who cared if the GM sweet potatoes actually worked; what mattered was that Kenya and other countries became places where Monsanto can sell its GM seeds and have its patents enforced.

Whatever the fate of GM sweet potato, what is certain is that Monsanto now has the green light to start field trials of its Bt cotton in Kenya.
***

Box: What is USAID?

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been the principal U.S. agency for providing economic and humanitarian assistance to developing and "transitional" countries since 1961, though it spends less than 0.5% of the federal budget. It is "an independent federal government agency that receives overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary of State". US foreign assistance has always had the furthering of America 's foreign policy interests, which includes supporting the US economy, US agriculture and US trade, as a key part of its remit.

The USAID website candidly states, "The principal beneficiary of America 's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the USAID contracts and grants go directly to American firms. Foreign assistance programs have helped create major markets for agricultural goods, created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans."

The head of the agency Andrew Natsios has aggressively attacked critics of GM, accusing environmental groups of endangering the lives of millions of people in southern Africa by, he claimed, encouraging governments in the region to reject the US 's GM food aid. "The Bush administration is not going to sit there and let these groups kill millions of poor people in southern Africa through their ideological campaign," he said.

Promoting GM is an official part of USAID 's remit - one of its roles is to "integrate GM into local food systems". USAID launched a $100m programme for bringing biotechnology to developing countries. USAID 's "training" and "awareness raising programmes" will, its website reveals, provide companies such as "Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto" with opportunities for "technology transfer". Monsanto, in turn, provides financial support for USAID.

Source : Text from GMWatch
***
ABSP

This Kenyan GM sweet potato initiative has become the template for USAID's overall biotechnology[7] strategy. In 1991 USAID launched the Agricultural Biotechnology for Sustainable Productivity project, later renamed as the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project (ABSP). The Project, run by a consortium of private companies and public research institutions under the direction of Michigan State University (MSU), was mainly interested in identifying more GM sweet potato-like projects from amongst the ongoing research projects at US university and corporate labs. These could then be used as entry points for US companies to collaborate with public research institutions in the South and to promote US models of biosafety and IPR legislation. During the anticipated six-year project life, the project was supposed to move its targeted GM crops from the research and development stage to field-tests.[8]

As explained by former ABSP Director, Catherine Ives:

"We will be working with countries to assist them in developing biosafety regulatory systems and intellectual property management systems that will promote access to, and development of, agricultural biotechnology."[9]

The ABSP, as USAID's first major biotechnology programme, signalled a change in US foreign agricultural policy.

In the post WWII era, the US government was primarily concerned with opening markets to its surplus agricultural commodities. With globalisation, however, the policy context changed. US food corporations are now interested in flexibility and substitution; they want free access around the globe to source and sell their products wherever they face the least costs and make

Go to a Print friendly Page


Email this Article to a Friend


Back to the Archive