The Modified East - genetically modified crops - Monsanto Co - Advanta Seeds Inc

Ecologist, The, Sept, 2000 by Iza Kruszewska

AS WESTERN EUROPE TURNS AGAINST GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS, SO THE TRANSNATIONAL 'LIFE SCIENCES' COMPANIES ARE TURNING THEIR ATTENTION TO THE MORE VULNERABLE EAST OF THE CONTINENT, SAYS IZA KRUSZEWSKA.

THE RECENT SCANDAL of GM-contaminated rape seed, imported to Western Europe from Canada by the seed company Advanta, highlighted the problem of cross-pollination of conventional plants by their GM relatives. It also threw up the difficulties of finding regions which are still GM-free. In response, Advanta claimed to have moved seed production to countries like New Zealand where no GM production takes place. Meanwhile, Pioneer Hi-Bred, which specialises in maize seed, has moved European maize seed production to Romania, Hungary and Austria.

Romania is a strange choice. Since 1997, US seed companies have tested and registered seven varieties of GM crops in the country, and in 1999, the Ministry of Agriculture approved the commercial growing of GM soybeans and large-scale trials of potatoes, maize and sunflower seeds, despite the absence of any law on GM seeds. Last year Romania cultivated at least 100,000 hectares of GM crops.

Yet Romania is not the only country in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that is growing GM crops. The uncertainty surrounding what is actually going on in CEE and the Newly Independent States (NIS) lies in the absence of any public right to information and, in many cases, poor government oversight.

EASTERN EUROPE -- A BRIEF BACKGROUND

Science and technology have a long history in this region. Indeed the grandfather of genetics is Mendel, a monk who lived in Brno, now in the Czech Republic. Already in the 1980s, scientists in many of these countries were undertaking experiments in agri-biotechnology, and by the early 1990s were releasing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the environment without any regulatory controls. Since 1991, Bulgarian scientists from the Institute of Genetic Engineering in Kostinbrod have been releasing GM tobacco plants during field trials. In 1996, in Poland, Greenpeace discovered GM carp with human growth hormone genes (to make them grow faster) that had been swimming in the ponds of a government institute since at least 1994! At this time, most of the biotech research was still domestically driven and funded by the public purse.

Now, in the face of strong opposition to GM foods in Western Europe and increasingly elsewhere, the transnational 'life sciences' companies, such as Monsanto and Pioneer, are choosing Eastern Europe and the NIS as a playground for their genetic experiments. Where better to exploit a culture of secrecy and oppression than in a region where decades of authoritarian rule has created a society afraid to assert their democratic rights to information and participation. These may be nominally democratic countries, but state officials there are still regarded with fear, rather than as public servants. The transnationals know that their activities are safe from public scrutiny and legal challenge. Many countries in the region still have no specific GM laws, and even in those that have laws, they are either weak or non-enforced.

First-round EU accession countries, such as Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland, and those torn by war in the former Yugoslavia, like Croatia, have been spared some of the worst corporate excesses. Yet second-round countries, like Bulgaria, and certainly the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union, offer the best chances for TNCs to push their GM seeds.

It is clear that companies want some legal basis for starting field trials of GM plants, because these are the first steps to commercialisation. In 1996, when Bulgaria became the first country in the region to introduce minimal regulations providing for an approval system for GM seeds, this was the cue for Monsanto to introduce GM seeds.

The picture presented below is sketchy, since information held by officials in most of these countries is closely guarded. They prefer to bend to the wishes of industry which demands that information on field trials be confidential, despite the fact that these same companies accept extensive lists of their field trials in Western Europe being publicly available on the Web. Some information about field trials then may not even reach officials, since few countries require the maintenance of a publicly accessible central database of all GMO releases. Information on the presence of GM food on the market is likewise non-existent. According to a Polish environmental ministry official: 'Strictly for ethical reasons, producers should label products which contain GMOs. Companies are the ones that have the problem [in enforcing Polish GM labelling law], not the Polish Trade Inspection Service'.

To overcome this information deficit, the NGO network, ANPED, The Northern Alliance for Sustainability, based in Amsterdam, has been working with member groups in Croatia, Bulgaria and Poland to undertake a 'mapping' of the national situation. Information about the level of commercialisation of GM crops, regulatory structures and so on, has helped identify the most urgent targets for campaigning. The findings have been published in reports, released in both English and the local language.