ritratto di un' industria in crisi

["Alessandro Gimona" <agimona@hotmail.com>]

Dal sito dell World Watch Institute


Ritratto di un' industria in crisi

(Notate che, ora che il recente Protocollo di Cartagena sugli OGM riconosce  
il principio di precauzione, e impone il dovere di mettere a punto una 
normativa sulla responsabilita' civile per i danni,  la crisi si fa, almeno 
potenzialmente, piu' seria)

Spero interessi

Alessandro Gimona



Portrait Of An Industry In Trouble

                               by Brian Halweil

  After four years of stupendous growth, farmers are expected
  to reduce their planting of genetically
  engineered seeds by as much as 25 percent in 2000, as
  spreading public resistance staggers the once
  high-flying biotech industry. (See Figure 1.) Stock prices
  for agricultural biotech companies are
  falling, exports of transgenic crops are tumbling, and
  questions are mounting about the liability for
  what is turning into a major debacle for farmers. At the
  same time, some 130 nations just signed an
  international biosafety agreement prescribing caution.

  Worldwide, the area planted to transgenic crops jumped more
  than twenty-fold in the last four
  seasons, from 2 million hectares in 1996 to nearly 40
  million hectares in 1999. In the United States,
  Argentina, and Canada, over half the acreage for major
  commodities like soybeans, corn, and canola
  are planted in transgenics. (These three nations account for
  99 percent of the global transgenic
  acreage, pointing to the limited global acceptance.)

  But with a growing number of food manufacturers and grocery
  chains in Europe taking products
  containing transgenics off the shelves, the market for these
  crops has been shrinking. American
  exports of soybeans to the European Union plummeted from 11
  million tons in 1998 to 6 million tons
  last year, while American corn shipped to Europe dropped
  from 2 million tons in 1998 to 137,000
  tons last year: a combined loss of nearly one billion
  dollars in sales for American agriculture.

  Investors have reacted harshly to the growing consumer
  rejection of transgenics and the resulting
  reduced sales of engineered seed and complementary
  agrochemicals. In May of 1999, Europe’s
  largest bank, Deutsche Bank, recommended that investors sell
  all holdings in companies involved in
  genetic engineering, declaring that “GMO’s [Genetically
  Modified Organisms] Are Dead.” The
  bank’s report envisioned the development of a two-tiered
  commodity market in which
  non-transgenic crops would command price premiums over
  transgenic crops—a prospect that
  threatens the farmers planting engineered seeds and the
  companies that sell these seeds.

  In fact, top commodity handlers, such as Archer Daniels
  Midland and A.E. Staley, have already
  begun to discount transgenic crops because of this greater
  financial risk. Commodity traders have
  followed suit fearing the loss of export markets as Japan,
  South Korea, Australia, Mexico, the
  members of the European Union, and other nations draft laws
  requiring mandatory labeling of food
  products containing transgenic ingredients.

  Most major food companies have already announced that they
  will avoid transgenic ingredients in
  their products for the European market. But now recent
  surveys indicate that consumer tastes are
  souring on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Several
  food manufacturers, including Gerber,
  Frito-Lay, and natural food retailers Wild Oats and Whole
  Foods, have said that they will avoid
  transgenic ingredients in their products sold in the United
  States—the largest consumer market for
  transgenic crops. If more American manufacturers hop on the
  bandwagon, the drop in demand
  would be devastating for transgenic growers and seed
  producers.

  Share prices for biotech seed companies that were Wall
  Street’s darlings a few years ago are sinking
  towards all-time lows. Investors in Monsanto Company, the
  industry leader which has born the brunt
  of public criticism, have watched the corporation’s share
  price lose nearly one-third of its value in the
  last year, falling from a high of $50 in February of 1999 to
  a recent low of just $35. (See Figure 2.)



  Brokerage houses have been advising major players in the
  biotech industry to spin off their ailing
  agricultural divisions. Novartis and AstraZeneca both
  followed this advice in December of 1999.
  Dupont had been considering issuing a new stock that would
  track its much-celebrated and nascent
  ag biotech division, but decided in early 2000 to
  indefinitely postpone the stock’s release. And
  struggling to recoup nearly $8 billion in seed company and
  agricultural biotechnology investments,
  Monsanto merged with pharmaceutical and chemical giant
  Pharmacia Upjohn at the end of 1999.
  The new firm quickly decided to turn Monsanto’s agricultural
  unit into a separate company

  Further complicating the financial picture are concerns
  about uninsured liabilities for farmers and
  agribusiness companies. In November 1999, 30 farm groups,
  including the National Family Farm
  Coalition and the American Corn Growers Association, warned
  American farmers that "inadequate
  testing of gene-altered seeds could make farmers vulnerable
  to ‘massive liability’from damage caused
  by genetic drift—the spreading of biologically modified
  pollens–and other environmental effects." In
  December, a group of high-profile lawyers filed a
  class-action lawsuit against Monsanto, on behalf of
  American soy farmers, charging that the company has not
  conducted adequate safety testing of
  engineered crops prior to release and that the company has
  tried to monopolize the American seed
  industry.

  To many observers, the rapid release of transgenic crops and
  the ensuing financial disarray is
  disturbingly reminiscent of the earlier uncritical
  bandwagons for nuclear energy and chemical
  pollutants like DDT. A combination of public opposition and
  financial liability eventually forced
  retrenchment of these earlier technologies, after their
  effects on the environment and human health
  proved to be far more complex, diffuse, and lingering than
  the promises that accompanied their rapid
  commercialization.

  In an effort to avoid this same dismal cycle with the
  introduction of each new “revolutionary”
  technology, public policy advocates have called for the
  adoption of the precautionary principle.
  Under current policy, a technology is all too often judged
  safe until it is definitively proven harmful.
  The precautionary principle holds that when a new technology
  carries suspected harm, scientific
  uncertainty of the scope and scale of the harm should not
  necessarily prevent precautionary action.
  Instead of requiring critics to prove that the technology
  poses potential dangers, the producers of a
  technology shoulder the burden of presenting evidence that
  the technology is safe.

  Industry has long labeled the precautionary approach as
  reactionary, arguing that it stifles research
  and prevents economic progress. On the contrary, advocates
  realize that all stakeholders—including
  consumers, government, and industry—benefit from an open and
  democratic attempt to anticipate
  any undesirable social and financial surprises. The goal is
  to apply wisdom and judgement about the
  potential effects of a new technology before flooding the
  marketplace with the products of that
  technology.

  The rapid rollout of genetically engineered crops over the
  last four years stands the precautionary
  principle on its head. Widespread commercialization of
  transgenic crops has come before—not
  after—any thorough examination of the benefits and risks
  associated with these crops. The regulatory
  framework devoted to transgenics is inadequate,
  nontransparent, or completely absent. And there
  has been essentially no public discussion about the many
  potential consequences of large-scale
  planting of transgenic crops. For example, U.S. Secretary of
  Agriculture Dan Glickman only recently
  called for studies assessing the long-term ecological
  effects of these crops. But more than half of the
  U.S. soybean crop and nearly as much of the corn crop are
  already genetically engineered.

  Another recent illustration of our lack of precaution was
  presented in a December 1999 article in
  Nature reporting that the insecticide produced by a widely
  planted variety of transgenic corn can
  accumulate—in its active form—in the soil for extended
  periods of time. The authors note that the
  effects on soil organisms and soil fertility are largely
  unknown, but potentially enormous. But, like
  earlier laboratory studies showing that pollen from this
  same corn could be lethal to certain beneficial
  insects, the fact that such effects had not been considered
  prior to planting tens of millions of hectares
  in this crop raises concerns about the adequacy of existing
  safeguards for ecological and human
  health risks.
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