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Compensation from 'accidental' illegal GM maize imports? |
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The US has been illegally exporting a banned GM maize to Europe for the past four years, reports The Independent.
 This maize is banned because it contains a gene that leads to antibiotic resistance, and there are fears that this resistance could be passed on to the people who eat it. The maize was developed by Syngenta, and was imported to Europe in error because it was confused with a different strain of maize. Almost more worrying, though, is that even when this error was discovered the Bush regime only informed customers in Europe of the problem after it was exposed by the journal Nature; moreover, the Independent reports that there were "efforts to hush up and play down the scandal on both sides of the Atlantic".
I have previously argued in Land&Liberty that the patenting of the genetic characteristics of crops leads to the appropriation of the world"s common resources in a way which echoes the violence of colonialism; it is coming to seem that the distribution of these resources also echoes such violence. GM grain gains entry to European markets through 'error' and - if the levels of antibiotics resistance in the population here do increase as a result of this grain - the damage will be practically irreversible. The massive community value to be found in our capacity to use antibiotics - the countless lives and huge amounts of money saved by these drugs - might have been depleted in order to allow private companies to profit from the sale of banned grain.
In case readers are wondering about the fabulous properties of this GM maize, the properties that make it worth risking such a massive community value - it has been "modified to repel a pest called the corn borer". I am sure that this pest is annoying for farmers, and that it will be in the interests of some individuals and companies to improve the value of their businesses by developing and growing such crops; however, they should not be permitted to risk much more substantial community values in the course of doing so. Imports of US corn to Britain have thankfully been stopped while this issue is resolved; however, the EU should now look at how we can ensure that such a situation does not recur and at how to extract compensation from those responsible for these errors.
Jon Mendel
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