For this column, and this column only, I’m defecting to the other side. I’ve decided to become Ray Mowling, former head of Monsanto Canada and current director of the Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI).

The occasion is a conversation with renowned Indian activist, Vandana Shiva, who was in Toronto last weekend for the bioJUSTICE conference, an anti-biotechnology counterpoint to the industry’s annual gab-fest, BIO 2002, held in Toronto this week.

Shiva is director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy and has worked for fifteen years to preserve ancient seed strains in India in the face of industrial agriculture imposed by the likes of Monsanto.

I — or, er, Ray — put to her the arguments in the CBI pamphlet, Good Ideas Are Growing.

RM: Ms. Shiva, the world’s population will likely increase to approximately nine billion by 2050. The simple fact is that with more people, we will need to provide more food. Biotechnology is helping to create rice that contains beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A. This product can offer a tremendous opportunity to reduce the risk of childhood blindness — a serious problem in developing countries.

VS: I’ve just done some collections in the high Himalayan mountains, where some villagers gave me red rice. We have a movement called Navanya for seed saving, and I started it to deal with Monsanto fifteen years ago, so that farmers could have their own seeds that are not monopolized by multinational corporations. And seeds that genuinely provide freedom for farmers and nutrition for people. Now this red rice that grows in a high mountain region in India has 3,400 micrograms of Vitamin A equivalent in 100 grams.

The technology transfer agreement for Golden Rice to India, the big place where all this is being worked out, has an objective after three to five years of development work of raising levels of beta-carotene in genetically engineered rice to 30 micrograms. So we have 3,400 and they will create 30.

It’s one more way of ripping off taxpayer dollars to do something that farmers and nature have done more efficiently.

RM: But the use of biotechnology will provide new ways to reap more bountiful harvests from existing land, while also sustaining this land’s ability to support existing farming.

VS: Well, as a farmer, I know that if I spray RoundUp on my crops and grow rows of RoundUp Ready soil on my land, I am biologically impoverishing the land, reducing the biomass output per acre and reducing the capacity to recycle that biomass to maintain the fertility of the soil. It is a way ofimpovershing the land, of wiping out biodiversity. It is basically a technology of ecocide. It is not a clever way of producing more food and being better custodians of the land.

RM: And yet plant diseases can take a devastating toll on food crops. Biotechnology arms vital crops with defences against viruses.

VS: Plants already have defences. It’s just that bad agriculture robs them of their resistance, just like human beings can be robbed of resistance. Plants that have been fed on chemicals are more vulnerable to pests. Genetic engineering of crops like the Bt crops, with the toxin built into the plant, is a guaranteed way to create super-pests and repeat the tragedy of the chemical treadmill, now on a genetic level. I believe the companies know this.

That’s why Monsanto, even while it is pushing its Bt culture on farmers in India, is already preparing a double genetic manipulation, knowing that the resistance of the boll worm to the Bt — for which it is designed — isgoing to be absolutely useless within a generation. For the Canadian context, all those decades of research with canola have been undone by the RoundUp resistant canola becoming a very invasive weed. The recipes of pest control and weed control are actually recipes of efficient creation of superpests and superweeds.

RM: Biotechnology can also help increase a crop’s ability to withstand natural environmental factors, such as heat and drought, soil toxicity and floods.

VS: False, for two reasons. First, there are already drought-resistant varieties that farmers have evolved in arid tracts of the world. There are also flood-resistant varieties. For example, our movement has conserved aneighteen-foot-tall rice variety that grows in the flood regions of the Ganges delta. So it is not the case that genetic engineering would produce something that farmers and nature have not given us. This is a public-relations gimmick.

RM: Opening up India’s economy to international trade will be a boon for the country.

VS: We have always known GE is not a boon. It is a threat. But the threat has come down in a very serious, life-annihilating way to India. Since the early 1990s, when under World Bank pressure the Indian economy was liberalized to open it to multinationals, the seed sector of India wasalso opened to multinationals like the Monsantos and the Cargills. Monsanto has since then bought up every major Indian seed company.

In the past three to four years, as a result of this monopoly, seeds have been pushed on farmers, they’re not being told the seed is hybrid and can be saved, they’re not being told that it will need pesticides. They are being told they will become millionaires and that this is a gift of God. They are using every god to help them with advertising and using extremely religious messages. Then they are bringing unreliable, untested seed under monopoly control.

That is the single most important factor for the farm suicides that have hitIndia. It is an epidemic. Statistics show 20,000 suicides among farmers because of the high costs of seed and fertilizer. So you add patenting to that and add the kind of criminalization that you have witnessed on the Canadian prairies with Percy Schmeiser, this is not a boon. It is a threat. It is a threat we are going to fight.

RM: In countries such as Canada, the United States and Argentina, yourfight has already been lost. We have achieved a merging of government andcorporate power to push food biotechnology. So GE food is inevitable. Thegame is over.

VS: I think the game is just beginning. People have beentold that you have to accept GM foods in Canada and the U.S. becausethis will somehow bring food to the Third-World hungry. I think that the more that northern populations start to see through that lie, the stronger the push will be to have their democratic right to choose the food they eat, thecrops they grow and the seeds they save, defended. My own work for the past fifteen years has been inspired by an outrage I felt when I realized what the companies had planned.

We are now at the level where strong movements that emerged at national levels need to converge into a strong international resistance and use every tool available to us in our democratic societies.