Not long ago, I was discussing BST (the bovine growth hormone) with a Minister of Agriculture of a European government. His response was - print it on the label and let the public choose freely. That sounded like a good free market sentiment but, in fact, it is deeply flawed. How can a consumer know the truth about BST or about other genetically engineered new products or indeed about most of the marvels of modern science? Sometimes the true facts are not disclosed. Much more often the true facts are not known.
I started my business career by founding a pharmaceutical company which today is a good sized European company. I went on to form a food manufacturing and retailing company which ranked among Europe's largest. Of course I am not a scientist, but I have employed many. I have listened to them and participated with them in the excitement of developing new products. We can all get caught up in the thrill. I can assure you of one thing. None of us can know for sure the full extent of the long term effects of a completely new drug. The scientists who developed Thalidomide were not men of evil intent. They just did not know the truth.
I can state categorically that the idea that the consumer on his own, by referring to a label, can assess all the possible after-effects of a new chemical, pharmaceutical or biotechnological product, is nonsense and must be rejected.
Intensive agriculture destroys genetic diversity not only in seeds, but also, of course, in all forms of animal and vegetable life affected by cloning, embryo transfer, gene selection, creation of monocultures, tissue culture, genetic engineering and the other processes of intensive agriculture. The granting of patents for new life forms will accelerate this trend because the law requires that the new patented varieties be internally consistent, that is to say uniform.
Unfortunately, farmers will be forced to adopt all these new processes because, at least temporarily, yields will be greater. As farmers must survive in a competitive world, they will farm intensively or be driven out of business.
With thousands of researchers experimenting throughout the world and using their imagination to create instantaneous new life forms unknown to nature and therefore untested by the trials and errors of millions of years of natural evolution, is it possible to avoid mistakes and accidents which could have unimaginable consequences?
But there are deeper questions. Man is very clever but is his wisdom commensurate with his cleverness? Has man the moral right to create new microbes, new animals, new life forms? Are we wise to transform artificially the course of evolution and to do so at unimaginable speed? Do we realise that much of the change is irreversible? Can we convert animals and fields and forests and all things living into unnatural high performing machines whose only purpose is to serve human beings? Is changing fundamental genetic information in living things, which will remain part of their inherited characteristics, the ultimate form of pollution?
The CAP must be reformed. A fundamental shift of objectives is required. The CAP should aim at bringing production into balance with demand by moving away from intensive methods and encouraging extensive farming. This would reduce surpluses, maintain a stable rural population, encourage family farmers and reverse some of the damage done by intensive methods. Also it would ensure that healthy food is available to consumers.
Over half the CAP agricultural budget would be economised by eliminating surpluses and this could be redirected to facilitating the move from intensive to extensive methods. We should not seek to reduce the overall budget.
Competition is a form of controlled warfare. In such a contest, communities, in which small or medium-sized farms still predominate, would be washed away as if by a catastrophic flood; whole populations would be uprooted and swept into urban slums. Those who remained to try to compete against industrialised and subsidised agricultural imports, by necessity would be pressed into adopting the short-term solutions of intensive methods.
The GATT proposals for agriculture, if adopted, would do enormous harm. Take Vietnam as an example of many countries making the first faltering steps towards rejoining the free world. It has a population of 67 million of whom 78% live on farms. Driving them from fields into urban slums would create deeper and longer-lasting devastation than the horrors of communism or the war. In the world as a whole, the rural population is 2.9 billion. Let us suppose that as a percentage of total population, it were to be reduced to the levels that exist in the 'new' countries like Canada or Australia. The result would be an exodus from the land to the towns of about 1.9 billion people. All in the name of efficiency and free markets.
Sixty years ago, the world's population was approximately 2 billion. Today it is 5.3 billion. The absolute numbers of those living in squalor has exploded. And during that same period, we have threatened the stability of the very fundamentals of life - water, soil, air, forests, the climate.
It is time to reassess the path that we have chosen. We must consider more profoundly the criteria which we employ to assess prosperity and contentment. We must select and use the extraordinary new tools of the technological revolution, in ways which are compatible with those criteria. And we must recognise that, at this moment, we might be riding an accelerating merry-go-round to hell.
A longer (but still incomplete) version of this talk features in the 'Fourth World Review' No. 49, L1-50 from FWR, 24 Abercorn Place, London NW8 9XP.