From Website: http://www.gmwatch.org
On today's announcement by BASF - moving its GMOs out of Europe
Ignacio Chapela, UC Berkeley (http://nature.berkeley.edu/chapelalab/?page_id=67)
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.
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