Caption : Lyndal Halliday
Photographer : Kelly Endo |
What sparked your interest in GM foods and what aspects are you most interested in?
I was working as a media analyst and Biotechnology Australia was one of my clients. I spent six months reading every newspaper article ever written on biotechnology, which is broader than just food; it’s about human research as well. I found it really interesting.
I then worked as a lobbyist. The company I worked for represented some large agricultural clients, I can’t name them but they were some big ones. We were looking after their interests and also the interests of a group, which was sort of a non-profit umbrella group that had been given the task of coming up with guidelines for introducing GM crops into Australia. I thought there was a big conflict of interest so I did more research and got very frustrated and I finally quit the job and went back to university and started researching it more.
As for the second part of the question, I’m not a scientist so I can’t analyse a lot of data, I’m a politics and sociology student. I’m interested in the politics of GM and how it’s negotiated in that context. More broadly, I’m interested in our relationship with the environment and food. I mean food is so fundamental we can’t survive without it, so what we do with it is pretty important.
What are the main risks involving GM foods and are they worth taking?
Well, science is still out about how much it damages the environment and how much it actually harms the human body. Every time there’s a study released that says GM is really bad for the environment another one comes out and says ‘no it is fine there are no bad effects’.
I think the biggest concern beyond those things is actually who owns food supplies and how they’re controlled. As it stands only about four companies control our staple foods from seed all the way through to the supermarket shelf. It’s quite concerning because we have a lack of choice in our consumption.
Is it worth the risk? We’ve been doing bad things with agriculture for a long time, well before biotechnology, so we seem to be living with the risks of that.
Do you think people are given enough information (from what is publicly known) to make a justified decision about whether or not GM foods are safe for them?
No, I don’t think they do and I think the information is very confusing. There are very strange regulations about what can be labelled and what can’t. The big push internationally, which comes from the United States, is to recognise GM foods as substantially equivalent. This phrase means they’re the same, relatively the same, as conventional foods. However, that’s only measured against what information we actually have about conventional foods. So, for example, we a lot of information about peanuts because people have a lot of different reactions to them, same goes for sesame seeds and wheat but there’s not a lot of information about, say zucchinis. So saying it’s the same is hard to know if you don’t have a lot of information about the original food. One thing with GM is that I don’t agree with it broadly, but it’s difficult to make a blank assessment about whether it will harm us or not because each food is so complicated and how it interacts with the environment and the individual. Like, it’s different for corn than it is wheat, to rice, to tomatoes, it’s difficult. And governments would have to take it on a case to case basis which they aren’t prepared to do.
Some claim that GM food production is going to solve world hunger, what’s your opinion on that?
I mean it’s pretty problematic, I don’t really know why they claim it’s going to solve world hunger rather than it looks good on paper, but the problem with world hunger is not that there’s not enough food in the world, it’s just that people don’t have access to it, or they can’t afford to buy it. So, there’s actually plenty of food in the world.
For example, a few years ago, India dumped rice in the ocean because it was costing them too much to store it, they couldn’t actually sell it domestically because the United States has sold their rice at an undercut price which killed the local market, and India has a lot of starving people. And Brazil’s the same, Brazil has a lot of starving people and they’re a net exporter of food, so there’s plenty of food being produced in Brazil, it’s just not getting to the people that need it.
So whether GM on top of that will alleviate that, I don’t know. I mean GM is meant to have a high yield, debatable, sometimes 10% sometimes more, sometimes a lot less, but if it still reinforces the same structures, of the involvement of large corporations and production which favours the larger scale producer not the smaller scale producer, all that sort of thing. I can imagine that GM is only going to perpetuate the lack of access to food. Also currently biotechnology concentrates on foods that are not high in nutrition, say rice and corn, and they’re not like eating a whole balanced diet, see smaller farmers would traditionally grow a whole range of foods in an undeveloped country that would feed their family and some of the local people in the community and they would get all their nutrients but with GM, you grow something like soybeans and you export it to the United States, or elsewhere for cattle to eat, and no one’s getting any nutrients. World hunger as well is also very complicated, like I said its not just about more food, but about distribution and nutrition as well. A lot of hunger is chronic malnutrition and mainly women and female children.
Should people be concerned about a corporate take-over?
Some of these environmental theories get tossed around and one is if something’s not owned then it’s not going to be valued and not going to be taken care of, but from that the owners need to make money from it, as an investment. So people look, oh if we own biodiversity, if we own some seed rights and things like that then, they’ll have value and be looked after, but what we’re extracting from it is not necessarily that beneficial. But it can be problematic, going back to world hunger, in the 70s they had this thing called the green revolution, which they started producing high yield crop varieties, which weren’t to do with biotechnology, they were just hybrid, but that was driven by public research, driven by government paid scientists, and there wasn’t any other agenda then to grow high yielding foods. With the GM revolution, the agenda is to make money for companies, so its not consumer driven, its company driven so we end up with different outcomes, that aren’t necessarily better for everyone.
What actions have you taken to support your beliefs?
I do a lot of research. I’m not a very noisy person, I don’t jump up and down and make lots of noise about it but I do a lot of research. I’ve done some of research for Greenpeace, I’ve done some research for Aid/Watch, the Greens and then just my own research I do at university. I did have a big email argument with Miranda Divine, from the Sydney Morning Herald about it, it was about world hunger and whether GM would help it, she told me I was spouting Greenpeace mantra, but I was actually quoting from the World Bank who has much more conservative views about how world hunger’s posed. So that’s kind of my level of activity.
Were there obstacles you had to overcome while taking action?
The biggest obstacle was resigning from my job that had very good career prospects for me and realising in myself that I was probably never going to be cut out to represent a corporate interest, more generally, I know it’s pretty unfair to all corporations, they’re not all bad but, that was a big obstacle coming to terms with that and going back to University. But on my day-to day basis, trying not to be hypocritical, trying not to drive my car, I do have a bike and I do ride it as well, just things like that, yeah it's hard you need lots of information and you often need money to do it.
What have you gotten out of your actions? How have they affected you?
I think my research is heading towards a much more personal, I mean it will be academic but I’m doing it because I want to personally understand how the environment and humans relate to it (GM foods) on a philosophical level, so that’s what I’m getting at with that sort of research aspect. On a non research-aspect, I don’t know, I just feel better not using plastic bags, and I feel better when I’m not driving my car, and I feel better when I don’t use chemicals around the house, I just feel a lot better without it.
Who are your action role models? Who inspires you?
You can’t get past those people that suffered terribly adversity like Nelson Mandela, that overcome and actually take the country and people further, but for me, this is going to sound really nerdy, but people like Jeffrey Sachs, they’re academics they’re economists, Jeffrey Sachs in particular is an economist for the World Bank, and he was on the inside and is very very critical of what they do and I find that very helpful because activism doesn’t have to come in the guise of dreadlocks and vegetarianism or anything like that, I mean this is a man who is a Harvard academic, he is very well educated and in very high levels of power. A whole range of people really.
What do you hope to see in the future for GM food production?
Well, I’d like the world to realise that science doesn’t have to answer everything and we know how to grow food that’s tasty and cheap and locally that doesn’t damage the environment, we know how to do this except we’re just not doing it. If only everyone got out in their local community garden and grew their own foods or that sort of thing. It’s not really necessary. Another environmental aspect to think about is monocropping, which is growing one type of product and it’s quite dangerous because bugs can come and eat it all and GM is a worse form of that. Out of thousands and thousands of plant varieties, there are only about 140 that we can eat, and there are only about 4 of those in production. If you think of the avarian bird virus, the bird flu, a similar thing could happen to crops and we’d loose a lot of food very, very quickly. The best thing would be to forget that whole kind of monocropping and head to something more diverse and more in tune with the environment recognising that we are part of it, not here to dominate it, despite what the bible says.
Do you think that if we go ahead with the genetic modification of food, then it might open doors to say, the genetic modification of humans?
They’re sort of treated a bit differently, in that researching with humans on that level provokes a lot more philosophical questions and people get very concerned by cloning and all that sort of thing, but to some extent biotechnology has gone down that road with human research in that you can screen your babies for certain conditions and then decide whether to abort them, and it doesn’t actually say your child has that condition, it says it has a certain chance of having that condition, and individual couples are left to make the decision, and that to a certain extent is a form of genetic engineering. And I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Gattaca that brings to mind you may only get valued on your genetic component as a human being as opposed to more spiritual side and your personality. They’re treated differently, but if we accept it on one level, maybe we’ll start accepting it on another level.
Do you have any advice for others who want to take action?
I’d say, firstly, keep informed. Keep reading newspapers, keep reading online things, get beyond the major newspapers. Write to politicians, volunteer for a group that’s anti or for it. Get into intern work in groups around the world, try to get overseas and do volunteer work overseas, I mean they’re big things. You can do much smaller things as well, like I said writing letters, or talking to friends, I always lecture my friends and family about it all, my students too. Depends on your community and what you have access to do.
