ABOUT |
| Pat Mooney is the executive director of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC), a small international civil society organization addressing the impact of new technologies on rural communities. |
| For more than thirty years, Mr. Mooney has worked with civil society organizations on international trade and development issues related to agriculture and biodiversity. He has authored or co-authored several books on the politics of biotechnology and biodiversity. In 1985 Mr. Mooney received The Right Livelihood Award (the "Alternative Nobel Prize") in the Swedish Parliament and, in 1998, the Pearson Peace Prize from Canada's Governor General. Mr. Mooney also received the American "Giraffe Award" given to people "who stick their necks out". |
| INTERVIEW |
| When it comes to hunger it is not the percentage that counts. It is the number of people that go to bed hungry. It is not a percentage debate. If it was a percentage debate all we would have to do is try to encourage the Norwegians to have more kids and we could win this game. It is an issue of how many human beings do not get enough food. By any conservative estimate about eight hundred and thirty million people do not get enough to eat. And that is the issue here. It is not that something is not being done, it is not that we don't have the science, it is a matter of will. As Kennedy said, "We have the means, we have the capacity. All we need is the will." We have not had the will. We could have done it and we did not do it. Kennedy made this rather passionate speech in 1963, a month before he was assassinated. |
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| "Presidents and prime ministers got up and all quoted Kennedy." |
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| Then we had a World Food Congress, which was called the second World Food Congress to link itself to the 1963 meeting in Washington, DC. It was held in 1970 at The Hague in the Netherlands. It was the first meeting where civil society had been invited in large numbers to come to a United Nations meeting. |
| At the opening day ceremonies the Secretary General of the United Nations, the Prime Minster of Canada, the Queen of the Netherlands, presidents and prime ministers got up and all quoted Kennedy: "We have the means, we have the capacity to eliminate hunger and poverty in our lifetime. We need only the will." They were so incapable of flexibility that even though the previous one had said it, each one got up and said the same thing over and over again. |
| The next day, when it was our turn as civil society, we were allowed to the microphones. We actually put up on the screen a picture of John Kennedy in reverse color, in black and white reverse. And then we played the tapes of the speeches from the previous day. We slowed down their voices as they spoke to drive home the point that it was not enough just to make more speeches. |
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| "At one point, the great big United States and little old Norway were the ones facing off over the right to food." |
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| From the industrialized countries there is Norway, which has been an impassioned supporter of the right to food, which has gone to the limits to fight for it. In fact, at one point, the great big United States and little old Norway were the ones facing off over the right to food. Norway held its ground and Norway got the rest of the world to back it, and it won. It was a David and Goliath environment and Norway won. |
| Norway has been backed basically by the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. They have been supporters of this issue. And they themselves have done a lot. The amount of U.S. foreign aid compared to the percentage of aid being given by Denmark or being given by Norway is enormously different. The real catcher is when you compare how much foreign aid from the U.S. goes to the poorest of the poor countries compared to how much of it comes from a country like Norway. Norway and Denmark focus on the poorest of poor countries. That is where they give their foreign aid. The United States and my country, Canada, focus on the rich poor countries, the ones we think of as future trade partners. So, yeah, I would give the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands a lot of credit. |
| Many countries in the South should get credit. Overall Cuba has done a remarkable job of feeding its own people. We can be quite critical of some of its human rights violations but the people are fed, the people are clothed, the people have jobs, the people have health care. And they have done that. I give credit to Bolivia. Bolivia is trying very hard to improve its capacities in food and education. They have done a reasonably good job considering they are an extraordinarily poor country. And it is equally true of Ethiopia, given the huge problems Ethiopia has had to face in the last several decades. With all their problems of civil war and everything else, which are totally unacceptable and should not be allowed, Ethiopia is a country that has tried very hard to increase its food production and be responsive to the needs of farmers and poor people. |
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| "We better stop having summits, let's just start doing the work." |
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| We have actually found ourselves, a bit to our surprise, meeting in the Palacio de Congressi, where the 1974 World Food Conference took place, and where Secretary Kissinger from the U.S. government announced to the world that within ten years we would end hunger. It is also the place where, in 1996, we heard the government say that within twenty years we would end half the hunger. One of our recommendations will probably have to be that we better stop having summits, let's just start doing the work. |
| People here in FAO are familiar mostly with the work we have done related to pesticides, related to the nutritional work we have done in the past, or work that is been done on plant genetic resources. In the future we are going to look much more at forestry, at fisheries, at livestock breeding, at these kinds of areas where much more work needs to be done. And we believe, in civil society, we have a very significant role to play now that the work has been done on establishing the international treaty on plant genetic resources, which we endorse strongly. |
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| "We have a very significant role to play now that the work has been done on establishing the international treaty on plant genetic resources." |
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| We believe that it is an extraordinary important treaty, though deeply flawed. It could be much better than it is, but it is the best treaty that we could possibly get at this time. And we do believe that much more work needs to be done in the future with a governing body related to farmers' rights. Nevertheless, it is a step in the right direction. |
| We believe that the work has to be moved on to looking at livestock. There needs to be an international treaty on animal genetic resources. We certainly need the same kind of work being done related to fisheries. Just taking a cursory look at the international treaty on plant genetic resources, you can take out the word 'plant' and put in 'animal.' You get into at little bit of trouble in a few places, but there is something there. There are some basic elements of political reality that exits in the treaty of plant genetic resources that certainly can spill over into fisheries and livestock reading, which needs to be done. And I do not want to leave out forestry. We have a very strong contingent of farmers, who are very concerned about forestry, and of indigenous communities, which are very concerned about forestry. |
| Conservation trust is an excellent idea. It is an idea whose time is certainly long over due. It is certainly encouraging that both CGIAR and FAO are taking initiative on this issue. It is very hard to dispute the essential need for a permanent funding for what is the first link in the food chain, the seeds, and to make sure the genetic diversity is protected from now on. This can only be achieved if there is an endowment of some kind that insures us against change in government, the attitudes of scientists, which has happened over time with some of the gene banks, against weather, war or national disasters, even. There must be mechanisms in place that can move in quickly to help solve problems and to insure that farmers varieties around the world are secured and are available to the farming communities in the future. |
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| "Farmers who have provided over centuries or over decades now material to gene banks, should have a guaranteed access to that material in those gene banks." |
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| An area of development that has to be articulated properly in the treaty is farmers who have provided over centuries or over decades now material to gene banks should have a guaranteed access to that material in those gene banks. Currently, it is sort of a patchwork of policies which are not clear always. Often requests from a farming community to have access to a material in a collection will meet with no reply at all. If it gets a reply the reply is unclear. |
| There are times, of course, when the seed does come. What is needed is a clear policy both annunciated by the treaty and supported by the trust that guarantees the right of farmers to have access to the seeds in the banks. It is essential. It is critical that in the consideration of ex-situ collections, ex-situ has to include not only the collections that are held in the field or in community gene banks, but also in organized systems by the indigenous committees and by the farmers' organizations. |
| Resource conservation and food security sometimes depend upon quick access to seeds. It is essential to have it where the farmers are not ten thousand miles away and in a very secure gene bank. |
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| "I cannot even begin to think of how we could be more disgusted by that kind of proposal." |
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| The aspect of terminator technology that drives me crazy is that we are hearing constantly now, especially this month from Nature Biotechnology Magazine and many other sources, that the scientific community widely accepts the GM flow problems of contamination. They acknowledge that they have lost control of this biotechnology, that it is everywhere in the world and that it is spreading widely. The solution then must be the terminator, that's the answer. In other words, the industry that was incapable of providing us with a safe technology in the first place, which is now running amok in our fields, that industry is now saying let's make the solution the problem. We have created another technology, which has not even been field trailed yet, and which creates sterile seeds for poor farmers. |
| I cannot even begin to think of how we could be more disgusted by that kind of proposal. It is simply ridiculous to rely upon that technology. We have a major problem with contamination with GM canola in the Canadian prairies, where I come from. The scientists say that we can no longer trust either plants or people to do what the market requires, therefore we must go to terminator technology. Now I would not trust the market, I would trust the people, and I would trust plants. We have to develop a system that, of course, gears towards that, not the market. But no one is saying this. The scientists tell us that, because of the contamination, we must apply terminator technology. This is from industry who said originally that they would not use terminator technology. Monsanto has said that. Syngenta has said they will not use terminator technology. The CGIAR has said that. Now, we have a reverse movement taking place. Now it is, 'Sorry, folks. Given the contamination, we are left without any option. We must go along with the terminator.' |
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| "There is a whole range of possibilities. " |
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| I would like to point out that there are many other possibilities to solve this problem. One of them is chloroplast genetic engineering, which, in fact, does, or seems to do a pretty effective job of ridding the plant of contamination, and, at the same time, it does allow for the seeds to be planted again. There is more than one solution here. There is more than one way to try to deal with the question of contamination. |
| There is a second strategy which is to excise foreign DNA from the plant so that it will not appear in the pollen or the seed. If you have, for example, herbicide tolerance in the plant you are growing, the next generation and the pollen from that plant will not contain GM material. We are calling that strategy the exorcist strategy. And effectively that is what it is. I would not recommend this. It is still experimental and we do not know if it is going to work. It is still experimental and we do not know its implications either. But there is a whole range of possibilities. |
| One of the worst aspects of the exorcist approach is that the exorcist farmers would be obliged to apply a chemical to their fields in order to excise the deviant material out of their crops. They would have to buy this chemical from the company that caused the contamination problem. To me that puts the burden of biosafety, the burden of cost and responsibility upon the farmers, rather then placing it upon those who are causing the problem in the first place. |
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| "Obviously the real solution is to not allow GM material into the field until we can be absolutely sure that it is safe." |
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| Obviously the real solution is to not allow GM material into the field until we can be absolutely sure that it is safe, and until these characters that produce the technology for us can get control of that technology, can say to us that it is totally secure, and that it is useful. |
| Here we have an industry, a very small industry based on five companies worldwide, that has proven to us that they cannot control their own innovations, do not understand their own innovations, and even worse that they cannot even control their inventory. And this is a private sector, which, one would think, the one thing they should be able to control is inventory. Warehousing, moving stuff around, they should be able to control that. They can't. They can't do that, they can't control their innovations. Then, the only thing that is responsible is an absolute moratorium across the board on GM materials. Nothing else makes sense. |
| These companies should not be going to the poor farmers in the Third World suggesting that terminator technology is the solution for them. And we are being told, of course, by some of the scientists that terminator should be applied on GM problems in the industrialized countries. We do not need it sent to the Third World where, they say, it could be dangerous. Can anyone name for me a technology that has started in the North and did not go to the South eventually, including nuclear technologies? If it is released into the North it will seep into the South in any of a thousand different ways. It will not be constrained and kept in the industrialized countries. Given that, there is simply no way it should be allowed to be brought into the fields at all. |
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