January 18, 2012
BASF Sees the Light
This week BASF announced that it is moving its GMOs out of Europe.
Will the English-speaking media lose its nerve and write about it?
Based on past experience, my wager goes to the habitual policy of
silence, and I expect that the news will continue all but unrecorded in
English. Most of us will not celebrate as we should.
Other languages do comment and give a little more detail, albeit still briefly. In German, the word is printed clearly: “BASF admits defeat”, while in French:
“The number one chemical concern in the world, the German BASF has
announced on 16 January 2012 that it gives up the development and
marketing of new transgenic products intended for the European Union.”
Clearly put: one of the largest among the few who banked on the GMO
route to do agriculture is giving up in its own home turf, defeated by
public opposition to its products which evidently do not live up to
expectations.
You will find some records in the business websites, mostly deploring
the European hostility towards GMOs, the loss of jobs (about 150-170 in
Europe, although many are relocated to North Carolina, for an overall
loss of about 10 jobs altogether) and repeating again the idea that
rejecting GMOs in the environment is tantamount to committing economic
suicide and “rejecting the future” as if this was possible.
I say that the future holds very little promise for GMOs altogether,
and BASF is only the first to have the capacity to recognize the thirty
years of bad investments. They can afford this move, which is not unannounced and
forms part of a year-long reconfiguration of the company to navigate
tighter economic straits ahead, because they are diversified and have
strengths in other fields. Monsanto and Syngenta, for comparative
example, have stood in complete dependency of GMOs since their
mothership companies shed them off to swim or sink on transgenic markets
twelve years ago; Bayer and Dow stand somewhere in between. Where
Monsanto’s stock would have floundered if they announced they were
closing GMO R & D in St Louis, Missouri, BASF’s stock hardly budged
on the equivalent news (it actually ticked upwards in the Frankfurt
exchange) – the timing of the news release may well have been a token of
deference to BASF’s partner Monsanto, protecting the latter’s stock
from the shock on a day when the US stock markets are closed.
The reasons for the failure of BASF’s products in Europe are many and
very diverse, but the fundamental truth stands that over the decades no
real benefit has offset the proven harm caused by GMOs. It is fine to
blame “the European public”, but we know that this public is no better
or worse than our own in the US or anywhere else – had there been a GMO
equivalent of the iPad, masses would have thronged the streets of Europe
clamoring for their use. But it may be just as true that BASF would
continue to push GMOs into Europe were it not for the tireless and
creative work of many hundreds of thousands, the kinds of numbers needed
these days to make a self-evident point which counters accepted
official policy. So I say to our European friends: embrace the credit
that is hurled at you and loudly celebrate what will not be announced as
your victory in the newspapers.
We are left in desolate America, though, land of government by
Monsanto, where BASF is relocating its GMO headquarters (some specialty
technical BASF outfits remain in Ghent and Berlin). In the North it is
impossible to know where the nearest non-GMO plant may be, while in the
South and in Mexico the tragedy of GMO soy- and corn-agriculture
continues apace, driven by corrupt or willfully ignorant governments and
against public opinion much stronger and much more vocal than what we
have seen in Europe. Far from recognizing the failure of GMOs
altogether, something that should have happened at least a decade ago,
BASF identifies the opportunities offered by the brutal realities of the
Third World, opportunities which are better capitalized with the
centralization, mechanization and property-rights enforcement possible
only through GMOs. As we celebrate the lifting of perhaps one third of
the pressure upon Europe to give in to GMOs, let’s not forget those
places where they will continue to be used as the effective spear-head
of corporate biological mining of other lands.
Ignacio Chapela is Associate Professor of Microbial Ecology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a Senior Researcher at GenØk, the National Center for Biosafety, Norway.
No comments:
Post a Comment