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PETER AND THE WOLF

Continued from page 5

Raven may not trust government to build a sustainable future, but he sure does trust it to monitor the corporate version. On Oct. 22, he cheered biotech for an hour on KMOX-AM, reminding listeners that "Americans tend to have more faith in their government than Europeans do. Most Europeans feel that their governments are in much closer league with big business."

What about the revolving door that placed Mickey Kantor, former secretary of the U.S. Commerce Department and former U.S. trade representative, on the nine-member board of Monsanto? What about the fact that deputy commissioner Michael Taylor, who wrote the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations saying it wasn't necessary to label GM foods, had been a consultant for Monsanto? So, for more than a decade, had John Gibbon, the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment chief who assured the FDA that Monsanto's GM bovine growth factor was safe. The list goes on.

"Well, I'm not an expert on the degree to which that's happened," replies Raven. "What can I say? It's almost a glass-half-full kind of situation. If they are experts, it would be natural that they are moving around. Sharing a pool of highly trained people is not that bad an idea, provided there are checks and balances."

Just look at Roger Beachy, president of the Danforth Plant Science Center. He testified before the House Agricultural Committee in March, explaining how his lab had collaborated with Monsanto on the world's first disease-resistant plant; then listing biotech's benefits and begging the committee not to impose any trade barriers or slow-down regulations. "The Food and Drug Administration has developed a longstanding history of food safety," Beachy reminded the legislators. "The seed industry also has in place well-developed protocols."

Those protocols were developed for traditional breeding, not genetic engineering. As for governmental regulation, "The Federal Government is one of three partners, along with the industrial and academic communities, in the collaborative venture that is biotechnology research and development," boasts a 1995 report from the National Science and Technology Council. In 1996, the Biotechnology Risk Assessment grant program had $1.7 million to offer for research into risks of "gene transfer," "additional pathogenicity," "changes in viral host ranges" and "potential for nontarget effects." Monsanto spent 70 times that much researching its own commercial products. Two years later, its budget for technological research, commercial development and patents was almost $1.4 billion.

(Patents, incidentally, are another biotech controversy Raven sits out. Monsanto currently holds 3,766 patents, with an unrevealed number pending. Some of the existing patents are so broad, they cover all GM cotton and brassica; all modified soy in Europe; all neem wax; and countless seeds, the first links in the global food chain. The very concept of owning plants and other life forms strikes many -- especially in the developing world, where each life form has its own spirit and right of existence -- as bizarre, unethical or unjust. "Mmm," says Raven. "I don't have any really very useful opinion on that. I'm generally thinking that a certain amount of patenting is OK. I don't find it illogical.")

The Garden has good reason to trust government agencies' benevolence: The largest single gift to their recent campaign was $7.7 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When a caller to KMOX pointed out that the FDA does not require long-term health studies on GM organisms, Raven assured her, "The FDA will do basically whatever the people of the U.S. want them to do."

According to documents recently released by court order in the antitrust lawsuits against Monsanto and other companies, scientists from the FDA have long acknowledged, among themselves, potential problems with GM foods that they have never made public.

Raven speaks passionately against monoculture and the alien, invasive species that take over habitats, destroying indigenous plants and animals. Yet he waves aside the criticisms that agricultural biotech itself encourages monoculture, saps diversity and helps weeds and pests develop resistance to chemical controls. He also dismisses the point that GM crops are themselves alien species, introduced into an ecosystem where they didn't evolve naturally and artificially endowed with traits that will give them an evolutionary advantage.

"About 1.5 billion of the world's people live in absolute poverty," Raven exclaims, so sincerely concerned that he's urging developed nations to forgive the Third World's debts. Yet he has no problem -- at least not publicly -- with a corporation that controls a significant chunk of the world's supply of seeds and paid its CEO $19.7 million last year.

Raven worries about toxins, yet he's perfectly comfortable with Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. Granted, it's proved far less toxic than the old versions -- but it's now being dumped in unprecedented volumes. The 6.3 million pounds estimated in 1986 has grown to 60-75 million, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and they're getting lobbied for even higher tolerances. According to the EPA, long-term exposure can cause kidney and reproductive damage, and we're not sure yet about cancer. There's already a human condition labeled "Roundup pneumonia" in the medical literature; and Roundup poisons beneficial soil fungi, insects, earthworms and fish. Heavy use is also encouraging naturally resistant weeds like water hemp by killing off all its competition, and it's altering habitats for birds and other creatures by eradicating the plants they snack on. Roundup Ready GM seeds are designed to allow farmers to pour Roundup right on top of the crop and kill only the weeds. Volume growth for Roundup last year was 2,801 percent in Argentina, 647 percent in Brazil; Monsanto estimates the worldwide potential for Roundup-Ready crops as more than 620 million acres.

Then there are Monsanto's "Bt" crops, engineered with material taken from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis to produce a natural pesticide long used by organic farmers. (That'll end; large-scale use of GM crops is already creating resistance in the insect population.) Raven says he can't understand why "an organic farmer would be happy to grow Bt as "natural' but look at engineering the same toxin into a plant as unnatural." But organic farmers say it's a problem of degree: When Bt is engineered into crops, it courses through the plant for most of its life, and it's produced throughout the entire growing season, regardless of the level of infestation.

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