The recall provided ammunition for environmental organizations that warn against the development and use of such products. "Our regulatory system is not up to the task of preventing problems with genetically engineered food," said Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

Calls for a moratorium or a complete ban on research and manufacture of these commodities receive a hearing. Many working people are suspicious about the motives of the giant food and chemical corporations as they race to put new products on the market in order to reap sales and profits with little regard to safety and health.

Protests against genetically engineered foods may often point to legitimate safety concerns. The cause of the problem, however, is not the technology itself but its control by capitalists interested only in profits. The issue of bioengineered crops has also been used as a cover for protectionist campaigns in capitalist trade conflicts.

One side of the introduction of these crops that has not received as much publicity is the effect on working farmers, who are facing rising costs and danger to their land as they are pushed into using modified seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers from agribusiness monopolies. Last December five farmers in the United States and one in France represented by 11 law firms filed a class-action lawsuit against the biotech firm Monsanto, alleging the company defrauded them when it told them that genetically modified seeds were safe and did not conduct the necessary testing to ensure safety.

Kraft is not the first big company to be affected by the campaign against genetically modified foods. According to the New York Times, McDonald's and Frito-Lay are among food companies that have cut back on using ingredients made from bioen-gineered crops, "out of fear that consumers would reject them."

Legislation on safety and labeling of food products has been introduced in the U.S. Congress and Senate concerning biotechnology. Similar statewide bills are pending in Maine, Colorado, and Oregon.

At the same time the campaign against genetically engineered food has become a weapon in trade conflicts. The capitalists in Europe, in particular, take advantage of it in their competition with their rivals in the United States.  
 
Technological advances
Genetic research has provided scientists with new tools in developing crops and animals with particular traits. Genes from one species can be spliced into another; going further, genes from animals have been transferred to plants.

Technologically speaking, such techniques register an advance over what farmers have been doing in a painstaking way for thousands of years in grafting plants, and selectively breeding seeds and stock animals for desirable characteristics. Today, genetically modified crops are typically altered to resist pests, diseases, increase yields, and boost nutritional content.

Over the past few years, there has been an explosion in planting biotechnology crops in the United States. Nearly one-fourth of U.S. farmland is planted with transgenic corn--meaning it contains "foreign" genes. Genetically modified corn and soybeans--the two largest crops in the country--were planted on more than 60 million acres of farmland in 1999. An estimated 70 percent of grocery store foods in the United States contain genetically modified corn, soybeans, and other crops, according to the Grocery Manufacturers of America, a trade group representing the big U.S. food conglomerates. Their dominant presence in the food industry includes snacks, breakfast cereals, vegetable oil, and numerous other products.

"The world market for food made from transgenic material--everything from potato chips and microwave popcorn to ketchup and soy sauce--is booming," said one report. Sales of food made with transgenic products have soared from $4 billion in 1997 to an estimated $19 billion in 1999. Kraft said the Taco Bell product line, with about 2.5 million boxes in stores and homes, accounts for more than $100 million in annual sales.

Genetically engineered crops burst onto the commercial market in the mid-1990s. Among the first wave of these products was Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans, which have genetically engineered resistance to the company's widely used Roundup herbicide. The Missouri-based company soon got hammered by criticism that it plotted to monopolize Third World agriculture and hook subsistence farmers on its genetically modified seeds. Its "terminator" products produce sterile seeds, obliging farmers to buy new seeds from the manufacturer at sowing time.

The next generation of genetically modified organisms included "golden rice," a crop enhanced with beta carotene, the nutrient that serves as a building block for vitamin A. The rice is produced by inserting two genes that make beta carotene into the DNA of a species of bacteria. Rice embryos are infected with the modified bacteria, which transfers the genes necessary to make the beta carotene. The resultant mutated rice plants are then crossed with other strains of rice.  
 
'Grains of hope' for handsome profits
According to the World Health Organization, some 250,000 million people worldwide are deficient in Vitamin A. Hailed as "grains of hope," golden rice would allegedly benefit at least 1 million children in semicolonial countries who die each year through vitamin A deficiency, and another 350,000 people who go blind.

Seeking to repair its battered image, Monsanto announced at an agricultural conference in India August 3, that it would grant patent licenses at no charge to the developers of golden rice. "We are committed to growth of biotechnology, and these applications...in the developing world are real," declared Monsanto spokesman Gary Barton. "They meet very human needs."

With almost half the world's population--3 billion people--dependent on the 560 million tons of rice harvested each year, biotech firms selling golden rice seeds could rake in hefty profits. "A billion new rice consumers will be added in Asia by 2020," Monsanto stated on its web site.

In April Monsanto, Novartis, and five other biotech firms shelled out $50 million for a TV campaign to promote genetically modified foods. The Rockefeller Foundation poured $100 million into the plant biotechnology that created golden rice, while Monsanto spent tens of millions establishing a "working draft" of the genetic structure of rice. The two scientists who launched the project in 1993 to create golden rice, were also backed by the Swiss government and the European Union.

Two companies, the Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZenica and the German-based Greenovation, have set up a donation program to distribute the seeds to farmers in semicolonial countries through government-run centers. The farmers, however, would only be allowed to earn a maximum of $10,000 annually from the sale of their genetically engineered crop before they would have to pay royalties.

Monsanto and other companies have developed two genetically altered crops, Bt corn and Bt cotton, resistant to the European corn borer and the cotton boll worm. Bt stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, a common soil bacteria that creates toxins targeting the pests, which are responsible for damaging millions of dollars of crops.

Environmentalists and consumer advocacy groups assert that the use of biotechnology threatens the ecosystem with "Fran-ken-foods" and "superweeds," and will drive small farmers to ruin.

In late July environmental activists held demonstrations in 19 cities, from Miami to San Francisco, as part of a nationwide campaign to demand labeling of genetically modified organisms. Several organizations have joined the campaign effort, including the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the Public Interest Research Groups. A $1 million campaign has been aimed at the U.S. Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, and several food companies and their products, starting with Campbell's Soup.

The environmental group Greenpeace and other opponents of biotechnology say that "genetic pollution" could contaminate vast tracts of agricultural land. They speculate that transgenes in pollen carried by the wind could possibly fertilize wild plants, creating indestructible "superweeds." A number of ecologists have raised concerns that widespread planting of plants like Bt corn could lead to the development of Bt resistance among crop pests. And, according to the World Health Organization, "health side-effects [of golden rice], if any, are unknown."

Spokespeople for Greenpeace and other organizations say that biotechnology will have a disastrous impact on farmers. In its "Golden Rice" report, published in June of this year, Greenpeace claims the "gene revolution" has buried small farmers "in a mire of debt and destroyed the very fields from which they eke out a living."

The monopoly of the transgenic seed market by corporate giants will control farmers' production, "dictate what inputs to use, thus increasing farmers' dependence and indebtedness," says the report. ActionAid, a development agency based in the United Kingdom, says poor farmers could be roped into "a cycle of seed and chemical dependence." As a result, both groups say, farmers in Third World countries will become even more impoverished.

These problems--which existed long before the techniques of genetic modification were developed by scientists and exploited by capitalists--are the results of the normal workings of capitalism. Farmers and peasants in semicolonial countries are driven off their lands by the cost-price squeeze that characterizes capitalist control of agriculture. Working farmers are squeezed on one end by the falling prices they receive for their commodities, and on the other end by the rising cost of the inputs they need to produce those commodities--seed, fertilizer, machinery, and other utensils. These giant agribusinesses are seeking to take advantage of their competitive edge with the new seeds to more thoroughly dominate the market and deepen the exploitation of working farmers.  
 
Protectionist campaigns
The growing interimperialist conflict between agribusiness in European Union countries and the United States has also been exacerbated by the introduction of genetically engineered crops. The U.S. capitalists' greedy embrace of the new technology gives them a potential edge over their competitors. Countercampaigns in Europe against such products have had a significant impact.

Last year the countries in the European Union purchased some $1 million worth of U.S. corn, a tiny fraction of the $305 million purchased in 1996. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, purchases of U.S. soybeans plummeted in Europe from $2.6 billion to $1 billion in 1999.

Demonstrations against genetically engineered foods in Europe often have an anti-U.S. character, featuring slogans against Washington and U.S. food companies.

José Bové, a farmer in France, became something of an international figure after leading nine other men in the ransacking of a McDonald's restaurant in response to Washington's decision to levy high tariffs on Roquefort cheese, paté de foie gras, and other luxury imported food--a retaliation against the European Union's decision to ban U.S. hormone-treated beef. Bové, who was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison for the vandalism, plans to travel to India in September to participate in a protest against genetically modified grain.

Pierre Lellouche, a member of the French Parliament's committee on environmental safety, asserted that there was deep distrust of assurances from the U.S. biotech companies that the food was safe. "The general sense here is that Americans eat garbage food," he said. "That they're fat, and they don't know how to eat properly."

Lellouche's use of such chauvinist language indicates how the campaign against genetically engineered foods is being used to back one or another side in trade wars.  
 
 
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