BIODIVERSITY: U.S. ‘Mutant’ Soybeans Will Draw Fire At Jakarta Meet

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IPS Correspondents

AMSTERDAM, Nov 7 1995 (IPS) - Objections to U.S. plans to export genetically-engineered soybeans to Europe will be raised at the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-2) which opened in Jakarta, Indonesia this week.

The environmental group Greenpeace intends to lobby governments at the meeting to impose a worldwide moratorium on the release into the environment of any genetically altered organisms. “We feel this could easily lead to widespread genetic pollution,” says Greenpeace’s Desley Mather.

The soybean at the centre of the present controversy has been genetically engineered by the U.S. chemical company Monsanto so that it is tolerant to the company’s own herbicide known as Roundup (glyphosate).

Monsanto has applied to the European Union (EU) for market approval for the soybean which would reach European and other world markets in autumn 1996.

However objections have been raised by Denmark, backed by Austria, Spain and Sweden, which insists that all genetically altered products should be clearly labelled as such.

Monsanto says the soybeans will be manufactured “in countries outside the European Union where the appropriate approvals are obtained”. The company is currently negotiating with several Latin American countries including Argentina where the formal approval process is already under way.

The ‘Roundup Ready Soybean’ (RRS) has been approved in the usual way by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration, but Denmark is asking for its own special certification.

RRSs will be sold to U.S. farmers and agri-businesses this month and will initially represent 10 percent of the U.S. soybean crop with which they will be mixed.

“It will not be possible to differentiate them or to determine that any soybean shipment from the U.S. does not contain RRS,” says a statement issued by the U.S. Office of Agricultural Affairs.

It adds, “In less than two years, all soybean shipments, from the U.S. or anywhere else, can be assumed to contain RRS.”

U.S. soybean exports to the EU are valued at 1.6 billion dollars a year and the insistence on labelling would block all shipments from next autumn.

The U.S. Office of Agricultural Affairs warns, however, that this would have a wider impact affecting “all agricultural trade to the Community (worth an annual 6.7 billion dollars)” as the RRS is “the first of many genetically modified organisms now ready for the commercial market”.

Both the U.S. government and the biotechnology companies object to labelling goods as ‘genetically engineered’ because they know the ‘science-fiction’ image of ‘mutated vegetables’ it evokes would put off shoppers in supermarkets, Mather says.

Greenpeace believes genetic engineering could have a profound effect on the world’s biodiversity. “We believe that meddling with nature’s genetic blueprints could go down in history as a big experiment that went very, very wrong,” says Jesper Grolin who is attending the meetings in Jakarta.

Unless control are put in place consumers will have no way of knowing whether a product is genetically engineered or not, he adds. “Big business will then be effectively free to recreate nature wherever and whenever it wants,” he says.

Up to last month the Convention on Biological Diversity had been signed by 128 countries, since it was opened for signature at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The U.S. has still to ratify the Convention.

Under Article 90.3 of the Convention contracting parties are asked to consider the drawing up of a biosafety protocol to regulate genetically engineered products.

Resistance to this has come mainly from the U.S. and Germany, although there has been a general lack of enthusiasm on the part of the industrialised countries. More support has been expressed by the developing states.

The meeting in Jakarta, which formally began Monday, is expected to address this issue, among others, and to start the process of drawing up a protocol.

However there is likely to be extensive wrangling over the scope of such a protocol and procedural matters. Generally the industrialised states are expected to try to keep the scope as narrow as possible while the developing states favour a wider agreement covering the whole life-cycle of genetic engineering from research and development through to waste disposal.

Environmental NGOs began meeting Friday night to forge common lobby positions before the ministerial level meeting starts on Nov. 14-15.

A detailed study produced by Greenpeace last year on the impact of genetically-engineered plants on developing countries revealed a disturbing situation in which chemical companies were tending to use developing states for field trials because national regulatory framework was generally less restrictive or badly enforced.

“Many northern companies appear to be using the less developed countries as testing grounds for crops designed to suit their home markets,” the report concluded.

At Jakarta, the dispute between the U.S. and the EU is likely to focus more attention on this issue and to give more weight to the arguments in favour of a protocol with wider scope.

“The Monsanto dispute,” points out Grolin, “is just one example of how industry is genetically altering part of the planet’s biodiversity for its own ends.”

BIODIVERSITY: U.S. ‘Mutant’ Soybeans Will Draw Fire At Jakarta Meet

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

IPS Correspondents

AMSTERDAM, Nov 7 1995 (IPS) - Objections to U.S. plans to export genetically-engineered soybeans to Europe will be raised at the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-2) which opened in Jakarta, Indonesia this week.
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