MCLC: how to prevent a Chinese Monsanto (1,2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: sean macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
Subject: how to prevent a Chinese Monsanto (1)
*****************************************************

Perhaps the concern for such issues is "US-centric" in the sense that
certain attitudes have emerged in particular cutures and and political
economies. (I have a sense that the Brits were even ahead of the US in
this regard because of  "advanced" modes agricultural production, i.e,
think the "mad cow" scares as early as the 1980s).

 
"Green Food" was a sort of marketing tag even in the 1990s in the PRC.
What this meant with regard to regulation, I'm not really sure.
 
This is a very important question. If by "a Chinese Monsanto" you mean
industrialized agriculture production, China has been centralizing
agriculture production and distribution for quite some time, but perhaps
there are new aspects of production and distribution that may be
complicated by the recent rapid hyper-urbanization.

And if the name "Monsanto" is used to refer to the scientific manipulation
of crops through DNA rearrangement, pesticides, insecticides, fertilizer,
and that sort of fun stuff, this has been going on for quite some time
(wasn't that in part what the "opening up and reforms" were all about?)
And that includes the cooperation with the company called Monsanto.
  
 
All the best,
 
Sean

======================================================

From: michaeldhychan at gmail.com
Subject: how to prevent a Chinese Monsanto (2)

This piece seems relevant to the discussion.

Michael

Source: Greenpeace (1/31/12):
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/China-says-no-to-g
enetically-engineered-rice/

China says 'no' to genetically engineered riceFeature story

It took seven years, teams of young campaigners and hordes of devoted
supporters, but September 2011 the Chinese government finally said it was
suspending the commercialisation of genetically-engineered (GE) rice.

See the full story in Greenpeace East Asia's online magazine.
<http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/specials/gpm01/>
The origins of rice cultivation can be traced to the valleys of China's
Yangtze River, with some estimates putting it at over 7,000 years ago. In
that time, rice has become an integral part of Chinese life and culture.
It dictates the lives of millions of farmers in the Chinese countryside,
feeds over a billion Chinese citizens each year and is synonymous with
Chinese cuisine and culture. And Yunnan, in southwestern China is where
much of this rice originates from.

Back in 2004, the GE rice campaign was one of the first campaigns for our
new  team in mainland China. Campaign Director of Greenpeace East Asia,
Sze Pang Cheung, remembers those early  days with a smile. "We launched
the campaign with a five-day bus tour of Guangzhou," he says. "Actually it
was more like a van than a bus, and it wasn't even ours. We borrowed it
from another environmental NGO.²

In October 2004, Sze Pang Cheung and his team headed to Yunnan where many
of the locals employ traditional sustainable farming methods. They
provided cameras so that the locals could record their rice lives
<http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/news/stories/food-agriculture/2006/the-
land-gives-me-rice-rice/> including "duck-rice" farming
<http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/news/blog/how-ancient-chinese-farmers-h
ad-it-right-all-/blog/38534/> where ducks paddle about the flooded rice
paddies, eating up pests and fertilizing fields with their manure.
Duck-rice farming has been around for 2,000 years.

The tour was such a success that the cameras were lent out for an extended
period of a year and a beautiful book was made to record the images. But
just as they were about to head south, the team got some bad news; Chinese
scientists had applied to commercialise four varieties of Chinese GE rice.
While the scientists' move didn't mean that GE rice would be
commercialized any time soon, it was a major step towards
commercialszation.

Rice dictates the lives of millions of farmers in the Chinese countryside,
feeds over a billion Chinese citizens each year and is synonymous with
Chinese cuisine and culture. And Yunnan, in southwestern China is where
much of this rice originates from. There was no doubt about it - this was
a critical fight. So when the team got back from the duck-rice fields,
they devoted themselves to the campaign. First they unraveled the complex
web of players involved in the push for commercialization.

"For a scientist to have a high level of credibility they need to be
separated from approval bodies and industry. But in China, GE scientists
are such a close knit gang that the people sitting on approval boards for
research money, biosafety boards that approve product safety, the
scientists at public research institutes, and those at biotech companies
who plan to produce and profit from GE rice are either one and the same,
or closely connected," explains Sze Pang Cheung.

We leaked their findings to the press. The web of deceit was published in
the Southern Weekend, a Guangdong-based newspaper. "After that story came
out the GE rice scientists and experts were inundated with so many calls
they appear to have shut their phones down for three months," says Sze
Pang Cheung.

Swiss-born Isabelle Meister was a veteran  campaigner by the time she
joined the China team in 2005. "It's easier to attack a corporation for
their dirty methods or products," she muses. "But what do you do when the
bad guys are scientists in publicly-funded institutes or sitting on a
government board? Scientists should be neutral. They shouldn't be the ones
you want to attack. So this was a big shock to me."

Isabelle decided to use a campaign method with Chinese characteristics:
China is a country where money talks, patriotism is prevalent and people
take their food seriously. So the campaign focused on GE rice was a threat
to food sovereignty. Multi-national companies ­ not Chinese farmers ­
stand to profit from the commercialization of GE rice from investments in
technology and patents.

By the end of 2009 it looked all but inevitable that rice produced in
China would be predominantly genetically engineered. Long after the fact,
the Chinese government announced that a secret multi-ministerial meeting
had passed two GE rice lines
<http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/news/stories/food-agriculture/2010/GE-r
ice-China-passed/> ­ even though they had not received biosafety
certificates at the time.

Chinese politicians began raising doubts over genetic engineering,
followed by a string of Chinese celebrities including Mao Zedong's
daughter, and the father of China's hybrid rice, Yuan Longping. Several
Chinese scholars signed a petition urging caution on GE rice and submitted
it to the Parliament.

"The pressure on the Ministry of Agriculture was so high it was actually
forced to announce that no approval of GE rice had been given and that GE
rice remains illegal," says Isabelle.

The time was ripe for us to begin a large-scale anti-GE rice campaign. The
team exposed American retail giant Walmart for selling GE rice in China
and filed a legal case against it. The team distributed a GE shopper's
guide to half a million Chinese consumers through mobile and Internet
services.Chinese consumers joined the campaign
<http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/news/stories/food-agriculture/2011/Chin
ese-GE-rice-survey/>, ringing up companies and demanding they go non-GE.

Greenpeace campaigner Lorena Luo will never forget one reader who was so
dedicated that she voluntarily checked all her favorite food brands at her
local supermarket against our shopper's guide . The woman then called red
listed brands and told them that as a consumer she would like them to
become non-GE. She showed a kind of persistence that would match any of
our in-house campaigners.
GE rice was big news: TV, magazines, newspapers and online media joined
the debate. Isabelle urged her team to get companies to make non-GE
pledges. Two huge corporations, Cofco and Yihai Kerry readily obliged and
a string of supermarkets also pledged not to use GE ingredients
<http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/news/stories/food-agriculture/2010/supe
rmarkey-guide-china/> in their own brands and with their fresh unpacked
fruits, vegetables and grains.

And then, in September 2011, came the big news we had all been waiting
for. China's major financial weekly, the Economic Observer quoted an
information source close to the Ministry of Agriculture saying that China
had suspended the commercialisation of GE rice.
While the fight is not yet over, we still need the Chinese government to
reassess its GE investments and focus on sustainable agriculture, there is
no doubt that our seven-year GE rice campaign has been a success.

Thanks to our members, activists, mothers, supportive scientists,
volunteers and concerned citizens, we took on Goliath and won!