In October 1996, a spokesman for Monsanto told Farm Journal why his company was buying up seed companies left and right: “What you’re seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it’s really a consolidation of the entire food chain.”

Today, Monsanto is the world’s largest seed company — and makes more money selling seeds than chemicals. The company’s biotech seeds and traits accounted for 88 percent of the worldwide area devoted to genetically modified seeds in 2006 — and Monsanto earns royalties on every single one. No one needed to tell Monsanto: Whoever controls the first link in the food chain — the seeds — controls the food supply.

What better way to understand the perilous state of industrial food and farming than by starting with the seed? Claire Hope Cummings’ new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds is a sharp and elegant analysis of the biotech seed debate.

Beginning with the tragic story of how the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq led to the destruction of Iraq’s seed bank, and the subsequent dependence of Iraqi farmers on U.S. aid and multinational agribusiness, Cummings explains what’s at stake when farming communities lose the crop diversity that they’ve nurtured and managed for thousands of years.

Self-reliance in agriculture — whether in Nebraska or Nepal — isn’t possible if communities lose control over seeds that are adapted over centuries to their needs, cultural preferences, and environment. Farmers have been saving seeds from their harvest for 10,000 years. Today, an estimated 1.4 billion people, primarily in the developing world, depend on farmer-saved seed as their primary seed source.

Cummings is passionate about seeds and crop diversity. Seeds aren’t merely an environmental or agricultural issue, she explains, but part of a human story that is sacred for many farming communities around the world.

A seasoned radio journalist, Cummings uses her finely-tuned storytelling skills to explain why crop diversity is important, who controls commercial seeds, and why it matters that the biotech industry has tried to systematically destroy — through legal means and technologies — the age-old right of farmers to save and reproduce their own seed.

In the process, industrial agriculture has laid waste to diversity, the environment and farming communities. The subtitle of her book, “Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds,” doesn’t do justice to Cummings’ work — because the subject she addresses goes beyond the debate on genetic engineering. This isn’t a diatribe against genetically engineered foods; it’s a highly-readable analysis that takes an expansive view of farming, food, and agriculture, focused on seeds, crop diversity, and farming communities.

Nonetheless, the first part of Cummings’ book does a masterful job of unpacking what is too often a cluttered debate on genetic engineering. If you want to deconstruct how genetic engineering has been used as a tool of corporate science and how powerful interests have worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. government to privatize plant breeding and obliterate the culture from agriculture, read this book.

Cummings shows how biotech corporations have used so-called “sound science” to dumb down government regulatory systems, and how publicly-funded agricultural research has been corrupted to serve private interests.

Seeds have been in the news a lot lately, grabbing headlines in February when the Norwegian government opened a Global Seed Vault on a remote island in the Arctic. Major media networks were captivated by the specter of a “doomsday” vault for seeds — a kind of agricultural Fort Knox — where the world’s crop diversity will be safe from war, natural disaster, electricity outages, even climate change. The seed vault raises some profound issues about control of seeds and strategies for conserving them. Some writers (who didn’t check the facts) mused that the Global Vault was just a corporate-funded plot that will ultimately benefit Monsanto and other gene giants. Others acknowledge that an insurance policy for the world’s seeds (basically, a back-up system) is a common-sense strategy.

But with all the attention that’s going to gene banks, the concern is that governments and the public will think that the problem is solved (the genes are in the bank!) — and, worse still, that funding and expertise will be siphoned away from farmer-based (known as in situ) conservation strategies.

But the real way to save our seed heritage lies not in vaults, but rather in fields: on-farm, community-based conservation in which farmers select and breed crops to evolve and adapt to changing conditions (like rapidly evolving pests and diseases) — just as they’ve done for 10,000 years.

In the face of climate chaos, it will be essential. Genetically modified crops will not provide the adaptation strategies that farmers need to ensure food sovereignty in the face of climate change.

I appreciate the way that Cummings treats the topic of the Doomsday Vault and the bigger issue of seed conservation. She explains that the rise of seed banks has occurred at the same time that the role of the farmer has been compromised and corporations have taken over plant breeding.

When it comes right down to it, Cummings notes, the issue isn’t gene bank vs. farmers. Both can be useful strategies. We shouldn’t have to choose. The vitally important thing is to reemphasize the public interest. She writes:

The rise of seed banking and the demise of the small farmer have turned agricultural seed saving on its head. The solution lies in putting the farmer, instead of agribusiness, back on top as the primary actor and beneficiary of all seed-saving strategies.

Exactly.

Md. Scientists Build Bacterial Chromosome

Scientists in Maryland yesterday said they had built from scratch an entire microbial chromosome, a loop of synthetic DNA carrying all the instructions that a simple cell needs to live and reproduce…

For ‘the soils’ as they are affectionately known in the UK, drawing a line against nano is a sensible and timely move. Nanotechnology used to be just a science fiction staple for the star trek types but today its a multi-billion dollar industry busily inserting tiny nanoparticles (that is particles billionths of a metre in size) into everyday items such as cosmetics, fabrics, pesticides, even foods. According to the U.S.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center, there are over 500 manufacturer-identified consumer products on the market that contain nanomaterials. A 2007 survey by the European Food Safety Authority, which has just begun wrestling with the question of regulating nanotech, estimates there are at least 70 nanotech food-related applications already on the market and most major food and beverage corporations are investing in nanotech R&D. The use of nanotech in cosmetics and clothing is even more widespread. Meanwhile there is a paucity of studies on the health, safety and environmental impacts of nano-scale materials, no nano-specific regulations and real worries about the unusual toxicity of small particles.

“There should be no place for nanoparticles in health and beauty products or food.” explains the Soil Associations Gundula Azeez, who also serves on an official British standards body for Nanotechnology “We are deeply concerned at the government’s failure to follow scientific advice and regulate products. There should be an immediate freeze on the commercial release of nanomaterials until there is a sound body of scientific research into all the health impacts. As we saw with GM, the government is ignoring the initial indications of risk and giving the benefit of the doubt to commercial interest rather than the protection of human health.”

Lest anyone should think this is a nano-storm-in-a-teacup its worth noting that the Soil Association has a good pedigree in getting there before consumer concern. At a time when ‘the Soils’ were led by legendary economist EF Schumacher (the author of ‘Small is Beautiful’) it co-founded of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) which now oversees global organic rules. In 1967 they published the world’s first organic standard explicitly banning pesticides, antibiotics and other chemicals from organic farming. In 1983 they banned animal protein from animal feed 3 years before the first case of BSE (mad cow disease) was discovered in Britain. In 1994 they banned GM crops from food and farming. In the wake of the Soil Association’s ‘no-nano’ decision other organic agriculture groups in North America and Europe are now examining whether to also ban nanomaterials from their organic standards, too.

The Soil Association ban comes in the same month that the UK’s largest consumer association, Which?, will launch its campaign to protect the public from risky nanomaterials in consumer products, following the lead of the US Consumer’s Union which has called for mandatory labeling, regulatory oversight and increased funding for risk-related research. It also follows growing annoyance in civil society that repeated warnings over nanotech safety risks are being ignored by nano-boosting governments. In mid-2007 over 40 civil society groups endorsed a statement of principles calling for precautionary action, manufacturer liability and new nano-specific regulations for nano-products. To date no government has enacted legislation to assess the safety or societal impacts of nanomaterials.

Indeed as with genetically modified foods when they first hit the market, manufacturers are not even required to disclose the presence of nano-size materials so it’s virtually impossible to make fully informed choices. In its newly published standard the Soil Association bans the use of human-made nanomaterials whose basic particle size is less than 125nm and whose mean particle size is less than 200nm. Thats incredibly tiny - smaller than the smallest known microbes and certainly far too small for any shopper to happen to notice. Organic therefore may become a ’safe haven’ for those who’d rather not gamble on this risky technology in their fruit juices and face creams - just as it did with GMO’s. The Soil Association certification mark already found on over 80% of organic products is now effectively the world’s first nano-free symbol but it won’t be the last.

“F.D.A. Says Cloned Animals Safe to Eat”

and

“188000 Pounds Of Tainted Beef Recalled”

These days genetic engineering, the standard practice of transferring a piece of DNA from one organism to another, is a routine, plodding and rather old-fashioned lab technique. There are several steps involved - ranging from identifying suitable DNA, cutting it out of its host organism, transforming it into a circular strand of DNA (a plasmid) and then somehow lodging it in the genome of the organism you intend to alter using a virus or a gene gun method. For some years synthetic biology has promised to speed up the front end of that process (the acquiring DNA bit) since it’s now possible to specify on the Internet exactly what DNA you want. Within a fortnight of clicking the order button, DNA synthesis foundries such as GENEART or Blue Heron can cheaply provide a custom-made plasmid ready for genetic engineering.

At present most synthetic biologists engineer their synthetic DNA into trusty lab microbes such as E. coli or yeast in order to see if their designer gene sequences “work.” Consider a simplistic computing analogy - the E. coli genome is the equivalent of an operating system such as Windows or OSX and the circular engineered strand of synthetic DNA is a programme that the researcher hopes will carry out some task such as making a protein or altering behavior of the organism. Of course biology is much messier than computing but that over-simplified metaphor is nonetheless a basic conceit of synthetic biology. Venter’s quest to create a novel organism with a minimal genome ( which we call “Synthia”) is an attempt to create a stripped-down operating system that’s leaner and meaner than E. coli and on which synthetic DNA programmes could be implemented. Venter’s recently published portfolio of patent applications seeks to own this operating system and the method of adding extra synthetic DNA to it.

Surprisingly, however, Venter’s approach does away with genetic engineering altogether. Instead of constructing a plasmid and blasting it into the existing genome of a living organism, Venter and his colleagues will place the entire synthetic genome into a bacterial cell and make that cell “boot up.” Significantly, they have broken down the entire minimal genome into 101 short fragments of DNA or “gene cassettes.” Any one of these cassettes can be removed and replaced by a synthetically altered cassette or, indeed, extra synthetic cassettes could be added (so let’s say there might be 102 or 103 fragments rather than the original 101). The patent applications then describe a method by which all of those fragments are mixed in a reaction chamber and assemble themselves in one go into a complete genome. The inspiration for this miraculous assembly is a favourite bug of Venter’s - an almost un-killable microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans that is thought to be able to travel in outer space because it can survive radiation doses that are three to five thousand times the lethal dose for humans. Even though radiation bombardment shatters the genome of Deinococcus radiodurans into tiny fragments, the bug uses “repair proteins” (specialised enzymes) to piece its genome back together again. Like magic, it can be fully functioning again within 24 hours. Craig Venter has called D. radiodurans “the ultimate genome assembly machine”. E. coli, in fact, has similar repair proteins. By using these in a purified form along with a mix of other enzymes Venter’s patent applications suggests that it’s possible to swiftly assemble the fragments of the Synthia genome, including extra gene cassettes, into a complete genome. Theoretically, it’s a new, fast method of engineering new DNA into the genome.

For those familiar with Venter’s past work this “fragment-then-piece-back-together-again” approach might sound oddly familiar. It’s the principle behind his ’shotgun sequencing’ method, which his private team at Celera used to decode the human genome faster than the U.S. government project. In shotgun sequencing the genome of an organism is blasted into small fragments that are rapidly sequenced in parallel and then reassembled inside a computer into one complete digital sequence.  In this new method, Venter is once again fragmenting the genome and re-assembling his fragments, this time in vitro - not in a computer - and with some extra DNA fragments deliberately thrown into the mix. The inventor of shotgun sequencing appears to be developing “shotgun synthesis” and his ambitions for this new technique are far from modest.

Not content with creating a faster method of genetic engineering, Venter is looking to emulate the robotic methods used in drug discovery to further speed up the creation of new life forms. In the patent applications his team describe a process that Venter calls “combinatorial genomics.” This precisely matches a process described in a Wired magazine interview several years ago:

“If you want to find the role of 100,000 genes, Venter says, the trick is to find a way of doing 100,000 experiments at once. All you would need that’s not already available is a synthetic genome, a sort of all-purpose template onto which you could attach any gene you wished, like inserting a blade onto a handle. You could then test the resulting concoction to see if it performed a specific vital task, such as metabolizing sugar or transporting energy. Using existing robotic technologies, you could do thousands of such experiments at once, in much the same way that a combinatorial chemist tests thousands of chemical compounds simultaneously to see if they have the desired effect on a target molecule. Most will not. But the ones that do can be investigated further. ‘I call it combinatorial genomics,’ Venter tells me. ‘It’s one of my better ideas if it works. In fact, it’s one of my better ideas if it doesn’t work.’”

In fact, the recently published patent applications claim that this process should enable the automatic production of not just thousands but “millions of different genomes” - a claim that Venter also made recently in this TED talk where he outlined his combinatorial genomics vision. Specifically, the patent applications describe a robotic system that rapidly assembles and tests synthetic genomes in a fast throughput model either by “installing” them into cells or by making them express themselves in a “cell-free environment… comprising the necessary transcriptional and translational machinery to express genes” - probably something similar to these microfluidic chips developed by David Kong of MIT which mix cellular contents in tiny silicon chambers.

If Craig Venter does indeed develop the capacity to create millions of new synthetic organisms per day he will also need a ready supply of thousands of new unexamined genes to test in his Synthia operating system. Here, too, his team is already way out in front. His Sorcerer II Expedition spent 2 years trawling the world’s oceans collecting organisms in seawater samples to be rapidly sequenced in the new field of metagenomics. Metagenomics takes the study of genomes to the level of entire ecosystems. Ignoring the messy boundaries of individual species, metagenomic sequencing faithfully records all the genes found at a particular location without trying to ascribe them to this, that, or another organism. In effect the whole genetic material of an ecosystem is presented as a soup. Geneticists can then comb through the gene sequences in this undifferentiated soup to identify genes with similar structures and properties.

Earlier this year Venter’s team announced they had so far identified 6.12 million new proteins uncovered from 7.7 million genetic sequences from the first phase of the Sorcerer II’s voyage. Within this wider dataset are hundreds of thousands of similar genes - photoreceptors, for example, that might be used to engineer synthetic organisms that convert sunlight to hydrogen.  Attempting to engineer those genes one at a time into an existing microbe would be a daunting challenge with conventional genetic engineering techniques, but with the “shotgun synthesis” and combinatorial genomics approach, such a challenge is - at least theoretically - more do-able. Venter hopes it may yield hundreds, maybe thousands of industrially useful proteins. Venter’s metagenomics prospecting doesn’t stop at sea, his Institute is also sampling airborne bacteria in downtown Manhattan and Venter half-jokes that he hopes to create  ”Whole Earth Gene Catalog” which sounds not unlike proposals Venter made to Google to make all the genes in the world Googlable. Indeed Venter’s ambitions don’t stop at Earth - rumours are that Venter has also talked of sampling bacteria from the edge of the atmosphere in the hope of finding DNA from outer space. In our report, Extreme Genetic Engineering, we joked that the ability to digitise and beam back life forms could create a new form of “star trek biopiracy.” Little did we realise how literally Craig Venter would boldly go there…

Este jueves fue desestimado por la Comisión de Medio Ambiente de la Cámara de Diputados, por 15 votos a 4, el Proyecto de Ley 268/2007 —redactado por el diputado federal Eduardo Sciarra (DEM – PR)— que busca modificar la Ley de Bioseguridad para liberar los transgénicos que utilizan Tecnologías Genéticas de Uso Restringido (TRUG), más conocidas como semillas Terminator (semillas estériles.) El proyecto pretendía liberar la investigación y patentamiento de estas semillas estériles. Esta propuesta, defendida por las grandes empresas de biotecnología, es fuertemente rechazada por los movimientos sociales campesinos y por las redes de agroecología. De acuerdo con uno de los articuladores de la campaña Terminar Terminator, Julián Pérez, “una posible flexibilización de la Ley de Bioseguridad en esta cuestión supone aumentar la vulnerabilidad de los sistemas agrícolas, cuando ya hay una tendencia a la uniformización genética de los cultivos; profundizar la dependencia de los agricultores y del país y profundizar el control de las empresas extranjeras sobre las semillas”. La tecnología Terminator produce una modificación genética que da una especie de plazo de validez para las semillas. Una vez sembradas, estas semillas, que serían vendidas y protegidas mediante registros, se vuelven estériles después de un tiempo. Esta tecnología impide, por ejemplo, la práctica campesina de seleccionar y guardar semillas en sus predios de una cosecha para la siguiente. “Las posibilidades reales de contaminación de cultivos orgánicos y convencionales por semillas con GURT acarrearían pérdidas económicas y diferencias de precio. La liberación de los GURT, en cualquier circunstancia y condición, representa una grave amenaza para la seguridad alimentaria, para las comunidades campesinas y para la nación”, explica Pérez Los terminator no están permitidos en ningún país del mundo, ni se ha experimentado en campo con ellos. .El Convenio de Diversidad Biológica de la ONU (CDB), que actualmente preside Brasil, recomienda incluso que los países parte “no aprueben productos que contengan dichas tecnologías con fines experimentales ni comerciales” .

• allow research, registration and patenting of sterile seed technology;
• allow commercialization of Terminator plants that are genetically engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals;
• provide a new definition of genetic use restriction technology;
• provide a new definition of GM plants engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals

The bill in favor of sterile seed technology is supported by the biotech industry and agribusiness allies - and it was supposed to come up for a vote in the Commission on Environment and Sustainable Development today. We just learned from friends in Brasilia that the rapporteur didn’t show up for the Commission meeting - so the vote did not happen. However, it could come up again anytime over the next few weeks. The industry-inspired group that is trying to overturn Brazil’s national ban on Terminator is the same group that tried unsuccessfully to repeal Brazil’s law in March 2006 - during the 8th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. At that United Nations meeting, over 180 governments unanimously upheld and strengthened the moratorium on suicide seed technology. Despite the fact that the Brazilian delegation at that UN meeting included several Monsanto representatives, the Brazilian government also supported the international moratorium.

Fortunately, Latin America’s Ban Terminator Campaign and the GM-Free Brazil Campaign are monitoring the situation in Brasilia, working closely with members of Congress and campaigning against moves to repeal the ban on Terminator. Maria Jose Guazzelli of the Ban Terminator Campaign explains that the vote in the Environment Commission is just the first step. It must be considered by other Commissions, with a written justification, before a vote in the plenary of the Congress.

For further information, contact the Ban Terminator Campaign in Latin America:

Julian Perez AND Maria José Guazzelli terminarterminator@gmail.com

Go here for more information about the International Ban Terminator Campaign.

By Silvia Ribeiro

All the companies which produce transgenic crops - -Syngenta, Monsanto, Dupont, Dow, Bayer, BASF- have investments in crops designed specially for the production of biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. They also have collaboration agreements in a similar vein with Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge, transnacional companies which dominate the global trade in grains.

In most cases, research is geared towards obtaining (amongst other things) new types of genetically modified maize, sugar cane, soya – making these crops inedible. This drastically increases the inherent risks of transgenic contamination.

At the global level, companies and governments are waging an intense campaign to present biofuels as environmentally friendly alternatives which could help to combat climate change, substituting a part of the petrol consumption dedicated to fuel for transport.

However, the inner logic is not to abandon petrol, nor to change the consumption patterns which produce climate change, but to take advantage of the situation to create new sources of business, promoting and subsidizing the industrial production of crops to serve these goals.

Studies exist which show that industrial cultivation of biofuels pose many problems. Brian Tokar, from the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, USA, draws attention to two recent studies from Cornell and Minnesota Universities. The studies show that the complete production cycle for biofuels leaves a destructive environmental balance sheet. Given that the processing of these crops requires a significant quantity of energy, their net energetic contribution is very limited.

Although biofuels can replace a large proportion of petrol, they require large areas of intensive industrial agricultural production, increasing the use of agrotoxic chemicals which erode and contaminate the soil and water, as well as entailing competing for use of the land with food production. According to researcher Lester Brown (quoted by Tokar), “Now it is cars, not people, which set the annual demand for grains. The quantity of grains which is required to fill the tank of a single SUV [Sport’s Utilities Vehicle] with ethanol is enough to feed one person for a whole year.

The producers of transgenics see an excellent opportunity in all this to increase their profits and to justify genetic engineering as something that is environmentally beneficial. Their investments in biofuels included the development of transgenic crops with a high sugar content (in order to convert into ethanol), high oil content (for biodiesel), and the insertion of genes which emit [Tr: expresan in Spanish original] enzymes in order to make fuel-processing easier.

Sygenta is working in collaboration with Diversa Corporation to develop maize which produces on its own an enzyme which converts the maize into ethanol, originating from an extremofila bacterium which can survive in high temperatures. The bacterium has been taken from the collection of bacteria which the company has garnered from around the world. Diversa has a similar collaboration with Dupont, by way of its subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred, developing a maize which has a higher cellulose and starch content.

They are using an enzyme which comes from a manipulated bacterium (Zymomonas mobilis), which is found naturally in the agave cactus. In both cases, the genetic manipulation compromises the use of maize as a food crop, increasing the chances that contamination could occur.

In this case it is interesting to recall that until 2001 Diversa maintained a bioprospecting agreement with Biotechnology Institute of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to search for extremofilic organisms and bacteria that are unique to Mexico. This contract was later suspended due to the efforts of a broad coordination of organizations and celebrities which started a broad popular rejection of the contract, denouncing it as biopiracy.

Despite this, Diversa never returned to Mexico the samples it had takend during the short amount of time that the contract was in place. It would sem. paradoxical that the transnational companies would use microorganisms extracted from our country in order to first genetically manipulate the maize and later try to sell it here as an “environmentally friendly” product.

Regrettably, the initiative of a Law for the Development and Promotion of Bio-energy, which has already been debated in both chambers in the Mexican Congress, promotes this form of development, and is supported by all the political parties. The justification of the initiative simply regurgitates the already endlessly repeated clichés used in industry propaganda in order to continue with the farce. What is more, it is argued that this form of development should indicate a support for small scale agriculture.

In other words, the peasants who created the maize should be ready to sow transgenic seeds of inedible maize, which will sooner or later contaminate the indigenous maize varieties, thus making it useless, are being asked to give it [the transgenic maize] their official endorsement. Or as if with the other crops, such as sugar cane, had to be at the costs of food production in conditions imposed and according to the demands of the agribusiness companies, which would by those who offer the cheapest price from any part of the world. This is why they promote such laws and programs simultaneously in many different countries.

Instead of food sovereignty, we will have more heavily subsidized multinational companies and more transgenic threats for the maize and for peasant economies.

Originally published in La Jornada, México, November 23, 2006. Silvia Ribeiro is researcher at ETC Group.

Una de las muestras más claras de las lógicas perversas del capitalismo es el empuje que desde gobiernos y trasnacionales se da a la producción industrial de agrocombustibles, principalmente etanol y biodiesel. La mayoría de los enunciados de esta campaña -mediática, política y subsidiada con recursos públicos- son falsos. Lo que sí es verdad es que el capitalismo aprovecha los desastres que provoca para generar nuevos negocios. Y como éstos generan nuevos desastres, entonces habrá nuevos negocios.

Los agrocombustibles se presentan como una alternativa ambientalmente amigable, frente a los efectos del calentamiento global y el consecuente cambio climático -que es un desastre auténtico y una amenaza seria para los pueblos y los ecosistemas, principalmente para campesinos, pescadores artesanales y pastores, es decir, los que proveen al mundo de la mayor parte de los alimentos y son al mismo tiempo los más desposeídos del planeta.

Pero aunque existe debate al respecto, las cifras de eficiencia de tales combustibles no son halagüeñas. Según David Pimentel y Tad Patzek, de la Universidad de Cornell y de California en Berkeley, respectivamente, por cada unidad de energía fósil usada en la producción de agrocombustibles, el retorno es de 0.778 en el caso de metanol de maíz, 0.636 en el etanol de madera y 0.534 en biodiesel de soya. O sea, el balance es negativo. En lugar de aliviar el problema ¡lo aumenta! Estos cálculos se basan en la cantidad de insumos que son necesarios para la producción industrial de agrocombustibles, incluyendo cultivo y procesamiento.

Por supuesto, quienes promueven los agrocombustibles se han dedicado a denostar estos estudios, pero aún en los cálculos alegres de otros investigadores, la ganancia neta de energía no mejora considerablemente. Pero ni en los estudios de Pimentel y Patzek ni de quienes los critican se incluyen los altos costos ambientales y sociales, producto de la erosión y contaminación de suelos, el aumento de uso de agua -un recurso ya en crisis y disputa-, la pérdida de biodiversidad por el avance de la frontera agrícola sobre áreas naturales y ecosistemas únicos, y la disputa de tierras que en lugar de producir alimentos se usan para alimentar autos.

En el caso de Brasil, donde la eficiencia del etanol producido a partir de caña de azúcar aparenta dar mejores resultados, se oculta el dato brutal, denunciado por Vía Campesina, el Grito de los Excluidos y otros movimientos sociales de ese país, de que la producción de caña de azúcar, desde la Conquista se basa en trabajo esclavo, y ahora semiesclavo, en condiciones humanas y laborales deplorables, a las que se agrega la devastación ambiental producida por los grandes monocultivos y las refinerías de etanol.

Sin embargo, Estados Unidos y Europa han adoptado regulaciones para que se tenga que incluir porcentajes de agrocombustibles en el consumo de sus automóviles en el curso de la próxima década, teóricamente, como contribución para disminuir las emisiones de bióxido de carbono.

El G8 solicitó al Banco Mundial que abriera créditos para apuntalar el desarrollo de este tipo de cultivos en los países del sur, lo cual ha hecho, así como también los bancos regionales de desarrollo. De una primera ojeada podría ser difícil entender por qué los países industrializados del Norte global empujan este tipo de producción, cuando los datos de su eficiencia son tan controvertidos, y además no existen en esos países s tierras disponibles para ello -o directamente, no las quieren utilizar y cuentan con que el tercer mundo usará sus tierras para producir los agrocombustibles que necesitan.

Un conjunto de razones explican este “negocio redondo”. Los inversores principales son la gran industria automovilística y petrolera -las mayores empresas del planeta-, junto a las trasnacionales que controlan el monopolio de la distribución de cereales y las que dominan el sector de semillas y agrotóxicos, que son las que a su vez producen transgénicos.

Como explica el economista Andrés Barreda, de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, la industria automovilística tiene una sobreproducción anual. Existen cerca de mil millones de vehículos en el planeta -con una población de 6 mil 600 millones de personas. Se producen alrededor de 80 millones de nuevos autos cada año, pero el consumo de los últimos años es algo más de 60 millones. Esta poderosísima industria, que está entre las más grandes del planeta y es la causante principal del calentamiento global, ve ahora una oportunidad excelente de aumentar sus ventas, sin detener el crecimiento de la industria y con un argumento “ambiental”. Con la obligatoriedad de incorporar una mezcla de agrocombustibles en la gasolina debido a las nuevas regulaciones -más con el hecho consumado de la transformación progresiva de los proveedores- los automóviles deberán ser necesariamente cambiados por otros que se adapten a ello.

Con los porcentajes que han decidido los gobiernos, los agrocombustibles no competirán realmente con la gasolina, pero de todas formas las petroleras están en el negocio para controlar también este insumo, utilizando sus mismas redes y en connivencia con la industria automotriz.

Por su parte, las grandes cerealeras avizoran excelentes negocios, debido al aumento de la producción y los subsidios para producir agrocombustibles: ADM ya controla 30 por ciento del mercado de etanol en Estados Unidos, mientras que Cargill y Bunge buscan consolidarse en los mercados latinoamericanos. Las trasnacionales de semillas y agrotóxicos, que son las mismas que nos han castigado con los transgénicos, ya están ganando con el nuevo impulso agrícola, pero, además, ellas sí “reconocen” que actualmente los agrocombustibles no son eficientes, y por están todas desarrollando cultivos transgénicos que prometen serán más efectivos. Aunque en el camino dejen de ser comestibles y provoquen desastres de contaminación.

Muchos gobiernos del sur avanzan en introducir legislaciones que posibiliten la conversión a la producción y consumo de agrocombustibles -en muchos casos subsidiados con préstamos que van a engrosar las deudas externas y por tanto pagamos todos. Toma así nuevo impulso la producción para exportación, en desmedro de la producción agrícola diversificada de pequeña escala y para la soberanía alimentaria.

Y todo esto, afirman los contaminadores, es una solución ambientalmente amigable

*investigadora del Grupo ETC. Publicado en La jornada, México 14 de abril de 2007