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Dear iGreens

I've been interested in Jose Bove for some time.  Anyone actually willing to put his own life and liberty on the line over these issues of biotechnology (and the WTO's circumvention of any kind of debate about them) deserves to be heard, even if his methods are "radical."  You do the readers of your online "article" and the issues themselves a grave disservice with your unexamined assumptions about the presumed benefits of biotechnology.  (One example of this is where you defend bioengineered crops as good for the environment, as though there were no other means to limit or end agricultural dependence on chemicals.)  Jose Bove is questioning all these assumptions in a fundamental way.  His ideas, if nothing else, deserve an equally deep response.  You might at least go through what you wrote and try to edit out the semi-hysterical, inflammatory language so that it doesn't come off like a reactionary screed, or the work of an agribusiness shill.  It's really lame.

Jim Howard

Dear Jim,
Thanks for writing.  We obviously disagree pretty fundamentally, but I try to reply to all letters.   I have a small confession.  The article was pretty much cribbed from the petition website, which is perhaps why it is perhaps a bit more shrill than my usual style.

I have no problem with Jose Bove putting his life and liberty on the line whatever that means.  I object to two things he does. 
1. Employing violence or inciting violence against other people.  For that he deserves to go to jail.
2. Trying to prohibit people from engaging in free trade and free speech which harm no-one else but of which he disapproves.   I dislike politicians who prohibit me from having sex with who i want in private, from eating smoking and drinking what I want in private, or try to interfere in any of my other pursuits that if they harm anyone, harm only me.  I find Jose Bove particularly nauseous because he pretends to be doing it in the interests of the environment when his real interest is small French farmers.

I appreciate that you and I may disagree about the environmental, nutritional and safety benefits and harms of GM food. The reason I keep on writing about this is to remind people that there are environmental and nutritional benefits, and that there has so far been no evidence of any health safety problem.  Please note that I never said the environmental benefits were the only way to protect the environment.

The onus is on people like Jose Bove, who would prohibit this stuff, to prove their case, which they have so far singularly failed to do.

I'd be delighted if you'd let me know of any decent evidence that planting GM food harms the environment, that it is not nutritionally at least as good as non-GM, or of a single person who has ever been harmed by eating it.

Remember, no farmer has ever been forced to plant GM, or consumer to eat it.  I'm sure you'll tell me if I'm wrong on this.

Best wishes

Jim Thornton

Yes Jim, 

I will tell you if you are wrong on this.  You are wrong on this. Genetically modified organisms ARE being forced on farmers (and thus, on consumers), because there's no way to keep them from interpenetrating a non-GM ecosystem once they're introduced at all.  We've already seen this happen, and companies producing GM corn have admitted it.  They just keep insisting that it's not dangerous and, as you do, that the onus is on the consumer to prove that it is.  (Gee, were all those quaint 20th-century consumer protections discarded while we weren't looking?) The WTO end-run prevented any kind of meaningful debate.  Hence, the Jose Boves of the world, few though they be, are attempting to force one.

Jose Bove has made no secret that he is a trade unionist and is standing up for French farmers; he just doesn't separate that from the broader environmental issues.  I'm not defending violence as a method, although I'm sympathetic to the impulse as well as to the cause.  There are all kinds of violence.  The kind that biotechnology has been quietly unleashing isn't usually characterized as violence, but that doesn't make it any less destructive.  When you destroy a farmer's freedom to grow what he wants to grow in his own fields, you're at least as guilty as Jose Bove is of destroying sacks of GM seed.  Jose Bove goes to jail.  Where's the accountability on the other side?

You express strong dislike of freedom-curtailing politicians.  Why are you so sanguine about businesses and trade institutions of the same ilk?  I think you and Jose Bove have a lot more in common than you might suspect.
But on this particular issue, he's way ahead of you.

Jim Howard

Final iGreen comment.

As usual no real examples of this “force” from the multinationals from the Jose Bove camp, just the same old assertions.  The problem is semantic. 

Imagine a shopkeeper who used to sell one type of tomato ketchup without GM soya, who decides one day to sell a new GM type instead.  Imagine that the police come into his shop, take the new bottles off the shelves and tell him that he must stock only the old type or go to prison.   That’s what I understand by force.  The old dictionary agrees.   

However, Jim Howard and Jose Bove have a new definition.  When they voluntarily walk into the shop, freely pick one of the new bottles of the shelf, pay for it, take the ketchup home and put it on their chips, the shopkeeper is “forcing” them to eat it!   

Communism may be dead, but Orwellian distortion of language for political ends is alive and kicking.

Jim Thornton  

Final Jim Howard comment.  

Jim Thornton:  Is your response, which misses the point entirely, the usual iGreens way of dealing with an issue?  In the world of genetically modified crops, the problem does not occur (initially, at least) in the "shop."  The problem occurs in the field.  If you're a farmer, you can't keep someone else's GM corn from invading your non-GM corn.  You seem to believe, although you have not addressed the issue at all, that these crops will simply co-exist, waving their tassels at each other over a fence line. You're living in a dream world.  Unfortunately, the dream is being paid for
with big agribusiness PR money.

So don't go slapping the "Orwellian" label on my use of language, when in fact I'm pointing out what your simplistic gloss on the subject willfully overlooks.  Where this subject is concerned, it would be more useful to invoke Upton Sinclair.  Today's methods seem much more sophisticated, but there's not much difference between canning tubercular pork with no consumer protections in place to keep you from doing it, and putting GMOs into anything you want by getting the WTO to circumvent consumer protections altogether.

You can put up my name and e-mail address on your site, but only if you print this response in its entirety.  Thanks.

Jim Howard. email him here

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Last modified: September 20, 2006