|
|
|
<< Stay tuned to this site |
Main
| Spring 2003: From Biodevastation to Biojustice >>
January 22, 2003 Biodev 2002 Report Back This report can be found on the web here . 
Contact: Lucy Sharratt, Polaris Institute
lucy_sharratt@on.aibn.com The gathering aimed to further the biojustice movement by: The gathering also aimed to directly challenge the industry convention
BIO2002 (June 9-12 Toronto) and the biotech industry agenda. These goals were achieved in various ways through the gathering. This report aims to highlight just some of the strategic achievements and
priority issues brought forward through the gathering – the bioJUSTICE teach-in and
bioDIVERSITY picnic and family fair –, and suggest ways forward. (If you would like more
information on the gathering please see the other resources listed in the box below or
contact the Polaris Institute,
lucy_sharratt@on.aibn.com. The bioJUSTICE teach-in program There is also a fun
photo tour of the entire weekend
–
www.biodev.org click the “slideshow” feature for
a moving loop of pictures. Here are some
media stories and a good
summary written by Brian Tokar for Indymedia. The Polaris Institute has now established a small monitoring
station on the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) called
BIOwatch. Click here for information on the BIO lobby
group and trade association.
For the latest in this organizing series and for a history of this project see
www.biodev.org
Report contents: 1)
bioJUSTICE: - Pharmaceuticals 2)
bioDIVERSITY: 3) Visions for Next Year:
Thank you to all our sponsors and funders ! : Teach-In Sponsors: The Council of Canadians, The Institute for Social Ecology [USA], The Polaris Institute Co-Sponsors:
Development and Peace;
InterPares; Students’
Administrative Council at
the University of Toronto;
International Center for
Technology Assessment [USA];
OXFAM Canada; Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy
[USA] Hosted by: Gene Action, Food Not Lawns, FoodShare, Low Income Families Together, The Toronto Food Policy Council, Greenpeace Canada Core Sponsors: The Big Carrot, Nature’s Path, Natural Factors, Ontario Natural Food Co-op Major Sponsors: The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation, OXFAM Canada, Purity Life, Canadian Health Food Association Supporters: NOW Magazine, Happy Planet, Noble Bean Tempeh 1) bioJUSTICE Some Strategic Goals Achieved through the bioJUSTICE Teach-In : There were 13 workshops on Saturday June 8 (each three hours long) as well as the Friday night panel that introduced biojustice, and the Saturday night panel that focused on biowarfare. Below is a short summary of how some critical issues were presented through the teach-in workshops and presentations. The challenge ahead is to build on the successes of the bioJUSTICE-bioDIVERSITY gathering by continuing to examine these issues and build analyses as part of a comprehensive whole, to focus on corporate players, and to build strategic connections between issues and communities through our actions. Justice and Diversity were the overall themes of the gathering. We wanted to frame genetic engineering as an issue of social justice and corporate control as well as an environmental and food safety issue. Diversity – both biodiversity and cultural diversity – was a priority in organizing the bioDIVERSITY Picnic and Family Fair and we attempted to make the organizing and content of the entire gathering reflect perspectives from, and issues confronting, diverse communities, particularly communities most marginalized and silenced in our society. (For resources on anti-racist organizing see Colors of Resistance at http://www.tao.ca/~colours/). • Pharmaceuticals One of the major goals in organizing the bioJUSTICE teach-in was to bring forward the critical issue of biotechnology in medicine. This was done through the Friday night panel "A Biotech Future?" that included a presentation by Dr. Nancy Olivieri, as well as through the Saturday workshop "Public Health, Biotechnology and the Corporatization of Medicine" facilitated by Dr. Olivieri, Colleen Fuller and Dr. Michele Brill-Edwards. The lines between the biotech industry, public research institutions and government regulatory bodies are becoming increasingly blurred. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are determined to develop and release as many "blockbuster drugs" – products that will bring in over $1 billion [USD] within their first year on the market – as quickly as possible. Universities have become the research base for much of the pharma biotech industry’s drug developments, while government regulatory bodies are increasingly becoming deregulated and privatized entities working in favour of the private sector. As a result, at stake are a number of components, such as independent research, academic freedom and drug safety regulation. Numerous campaigns have also been launched against the increasing privatization of health care in Canada, as well as the already fully privatized health care system in the U.S. Dr. Nancy Olivieri is a medical doctor and researcher with the University of Toronto at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Her struggles with the corporation Apotex over her disclosure of the risks of one of their drugs in documented on www.doctorsintegrity.com Troubles with university-corporate research partnerships and the failings of health care and research funding are made clear in what has been called "the greatest academic scandal of our era". See www.polarisinstitute.org for a factsheet on corporate-university research. Colleen Fuller is author of the book "Caring for Profit: How Corporations are Taking Over Canada’s Health Care System". She also a part of the group PharmaWatch and has launched a lawsuit against the makers of genetically engineered insulin as well as Health Canada. The genetically engineered or synthetic insulin called Humalin is sold by Eily Lilly and is gradually replacing animal insulin, which is being phased out. Health Canada confirms that since 1998 it has received 121 reports of problems relating to the GE insulin while the animal insulin is becoming harder for patients to find. Fuller argues that Health Canada has an obligation to make sure the alternative insulin product is also on the market. Dr. Michele Brill-Edwards quit her job as senior physician responsible for the regulation of prescription drugs in Health Canada when she saw corporate influence jeopardizing public safety in the drug approval process. See www.polarisinstitute.org for a factsheet and booklet on Pharma Biotech Engines. See also Galloping Gene Giants from the Polaris Institute on how the pharmaceutical and agricultural biotech investments are tied together. See also the Canadian Health Coalition at www.healthcoalition.ca and the Council of Canadians at www.canadians.org for their campaign to protect public healthcare in Canada and the Polaris Institute for information on corporate efforts to privatize healthcare. • Disability Another major goal of the bioJUSTICE-bioDIVERSITY gathering was to incorporate the issues of disability rights and the marginalization of people with disabilities into the content of the teach-in and through efforts to make the teach-in accessible to people with disabilities. Gregor Wolbring, professor at the University of Calgary and founder of the International Centre for Bioethics, Culture and Disability www.bioethicsanddisability.org addressed issues relating to disability and prejudice when he spoke on Friday night as part of the opening panel as well as in his Saturday workshop "The Tyranny of Normal: Disability, Culture and Human Engineering". What leads to the development of human genetic technologies?: Dr Wolbring argued that mainstream negative perceptions of people with disabilities are selling these new genetic technologies – that it is in fact our attitude towards people with disabilities that is allowing the biotech industry to go ahead and develop these new technologies. Human genetic technologies, like genetic screening and stem cell technologies, are marketable because our society agrees that people with disabilities are a medical problem to be fixed. But there is another way to view disability and this is to see the issue of disability as mainly a socially created problem and principally a matter of the full integration of individuals with disabilities into our society. It is the collective responsibility of society at large to make the environmental changes necessity for the full participation of people with disabilities. "Disability is a social justice concept, the same as sexism (or) racism…Normal is a lack of variation. There is no such thing as normal. Normal is set up by a certain amount of people who have the power to decide, to define norms. It’s the opposite of diversity because you have to adhere to that norm". In the case of human genetic technologies biotechnology corporations are only doing what is already marketable, they are only fulfilling our own desires: "You have to change: to work with disabled people, to go further than the safety debate and look at the underpinnings of what leads to the technology... you have to shift your paradigm because BIO2002 is only selling what is sellable in our society." Click here to access a summary of arguments in Dr. Wolbring’s paper "The silent targets". To subscribe to the listserve on bioethics and disability send a blank email to bioethics-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Also see the American Association of People with Disabilities www.aapd-dc.org For more discussion on human genetic technologies see work on pharma biotech engines at www.polarisinstitute.org
Discussions about genetic engineering need to
include people with disabilities as they are so
often the targets of new genetic technologies,
like genetic screening and stem cell research
for example. Accessibility of the teach-in to
people with disabilities was achieved with
varying degrees of success and failure.
Click here for a summary
of our lessons learned from this organizing
experience. Thanks to David Werner for use of his graphics, see www.healthwrights.org • Biowarfare The bioJUSTICE teach-in included an evening panel that focused exclusively on the issue of biowarfare – the hostile use of biological agents. There was much new information to learn about what bioweapons are and how they are tied to new genetic research. Many of the new genetic technologies being developed by pharmaceutical companies for example can be applied to the manufacture of biological weapons agents – the problem of "dual-use" technologies. We learned that the US is now the major culprit in bringing the world to the brink of a biological arms race. Importantly, Brian Tokar from the Institute for Social Ecology also pointed out that the same corporations that are now genetically engineering food have their roots in wartime pesticide production, have profited tremendously from war throughout their histories, and have long collaborated with military establishments to make the world a more dangerous place.
Kehben Grifter and Juan Martinez from the beehive design collective in the United States presented a narrative of their amazing and intricate banner "Plan Colombia" about colonization in Latin America and the use of bioweapons to kill coca crops in Columbia. (See graphic on the next page and see their website to view the poster and read their explanation www.beehivecollective.org) The banner forms a large quilt of images created as a political organizing tool. They hung two copies of the banner on either side of the stage and presented slides of some of the details that portray the colonial relations dominating the politics and economics of Colombia, as well as how resistance lives on. Plan Columbia is a part of the US funded "war on drugs" to kill coca crops with aerial spraying but it is doing far more than this. The fumigation campaign is destroying food crops and eradicating medicinal plants as well as creating health problems and contaminating water supplies, forcing farmers of their land. See www.soaw-ne.org/Pccrops.html for a good article on Plan Columbia by the School of the Americas Watch. Plan Columbia violates the Bioweapons Convention since it is a hostile use of biological agents, it also opens the door for other countries to follow the US’s example and develop and use offensive bioweapons. The Geneva Protocol banned the use of bioweapons and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) bans the development, stockpiling and transfer of bioweapons. But the BWC does not include mechanisms to monitor and verify a country’s activities. This is why countries were negotiating the Verification Protocol to the BWC. The Verification Protocol would demand transparency by requiring countries to declare all their biodefense programs and opening them up to random UN inspections. Last year the US rejected these ideas entirely and so other countries are yet to sign this protocol. We learned from Mark Wheelis of the University of California and Jan Van Aken of the Sunshine Project that the U.S government is also violating the Biological Weapons Convention by developing "non-lethal" chemical weapons for use in crowd control (like offensive odours and drugs that alter people’s behaviour and emotional states, ability to control the body and cognition) as well as genetically-engineered microbes capable of destroying materials (anti-material weapons that can degrade tarmac, rubber, insulation, stealth coating or camouflage paint, fuel, lubricants etc). The US is also trying to engineer terminator or suicide technology into anti-material weapons to try switch off them off and keep them from persisting in the environment. Non-lethal weapons programs can provide a cover for lethal weapons development, they can also be lethal when they are combined and there is also the temptation to use an arsenal of these weapons in war. In addition to the non-lethal weapons research, the US has been building bioweapons under its "threat assessment project" to test theories of how easy it may be for other countries or people to produce weapons. Dr Wheelis argued that the US research programs and international policies set a dangerous precedent that other countries may follow. What We Can Do:
For more information see the Sunshine Project www.sunshine-project.org and Mark Wheelis’s home page http://microbiology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/mwheelis/ . See also the new Polaris Institute program on the Corporate Security State, www.polarisinstitute.org • Indigenous Rights and Colonization Debra Harry, founder of the Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism, presented on Friday night and ran a workshop on the Saturday with Dawn Martin Hill, academic director of the Indigenous Studies Program at McMaster University. Visit www.ipcb.org to read Debra Harry’s short paper "Biopiracy and Globalization: Indigenous Peoples Face a New Wave of Colonization." At the Saturday workshop, Dawn Martin Hill spoke about indigenous knowledge, with a focus on how indigenous peoples’ relationship with nature is fundamentally opposed to the biotechnology industry’s view of nature as something to be conquered and manipulated. She also addressed the ways in which indigenous women’s relationship with the natural world and with their families was undermined through the disruption of traditional gender roles and relationships brought by European colonization. Debra Harry began her workshop presentation with a film entitled Gene Hunters (not to be confused with The Gene Hunters), a film about the genetic exploitation of indigenous communities around the world by scientists eager to catalogue the genetic diversity of indigenous peoples for the Human Genome Diversity Project. She followed this film by introducing and discussing some approaches that indigenous communities, including the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, are taking as communities on the front lines of the struggles against gene prospecting and biocolonialism. • Farm Crisis Two Ontario farmers and National Farmers Union (NFU) members, Scott Armstrong of Circle Sun Farm and David Pullen www.mcfarm.on.ca , facilitated the workshop "The Farm Crisis, Agribusiness and Genetic Engineering" with Bill Wenzel of the U.S. Farmer to Farmer Campaign Against Genetic Engineering www.nffc.net/index.htm .
Farm incomes have returned to Depression-era levels. Farmers are constantly told to ad opt new technologies like pesticides and genetic engineering that claim higher returns or reduced costs but as farmers have embraced a wide range of technologies net farm incomes have fallen and input suppliers have captured 100% of farmers' increased gross returns. Genetic engineering in agriculture has significantly increased the economic uncertainty of family farmers throughout the U.S. and the world. American farmers have lost critical markets that are closed to genetically engineered products. Corporate control of the seed supply threatens farmers' independence. The risk of genetic drift has made it difficult and expensive for farmers to market a pure product. Genetic engineering has created social and economic disruption that threatens traditional agricultural practices for farmers around the world. Farmers who have used this new technology may be facing massive liability from damage caused by genetic drift, increased weed and pest resistance, and the destruction of wildlife and beneficial insects. From the Farmer’s Declaration, National Family Farm Coalition, US http://www.nffc.net/bio1.htm Cathy Holtslander from the Saskatoon Eco-Network presented on Friday night on behalf of the Saskatchewan organic farmers who are suing Monsanto and Aventis for contaminating their canola crops with genetically engineered canola. The farmers are also seeking an injunction to stop the approval of GE wheat. The farmers are asking for your support for their court case, please see www.saskorganic.com Solutions to the Farm Crisis as brought forward by bioJUSTICE workshop attendants:
• Ethics Issues and discussions related to biotechnology are often restricted to arguments based on scientific merit but this workshop brought together a group of who were interested in approaching biotechnology with an analysis grounded in ethics and social consciousness. The workshop facilitators were Brewster Kneen, an food system analyst and theologian from BC, Brian Burch, a social justice activist and writer from Toronto, Rev. Eric Beresford of the Anglican Church of Canada, Toronto, and Rick Smith of the Internal Fund for Animal Welfare, Ottawa. The workshop consisted of broad and open debates on, to name a few, the meaning of ethics; the relationship between the birth of Western science and the rise of market capitalism; people’s individual and collective responsibility to engage in direct action against harmful developments in biotechnology; and the implications of race-based drug production for people of colour and indigenous communities. The message was that you don’t have to be a scientist or an "expert" of any kind to talk about genetic engineering, engage in this debate, and decide what you think. For further discussions see The Ram’s Horn newsletter published by Brewster and Cathleen Kneen www.ramshorn.bc.ca • Genetically Engineered Trees Over 35 people attended this three-hour workshop on GE trees that covered the traits being engineered including, glyphosate resistance, Bt toxin production, reduced lignin, and sterility. The ecological impacts of these traits were addressed and discussed at length as were the legal and environmental aspects of contamination of public (crown) lands by patented life forms. Also covered were the effects of GE trees in plantation forestry, the impacts on indigenous peoples and the use of GE trees in carbon-offset forestry. Currently, GE trees are being researched and developed in at least 16 countries including Canada and the U.S. but are not yet in commercial production. In the U.S. commercial production could be about 5 years away, but it could certainly be sooner in other nations such as Chile. Action for Social and Ecological Justice (ASEJ)
has been running the only full-time campaign on
GE trees for the last 2 years but recently other
U.S. groups, such as Rainforest Action Network,
Northwest Resistance Against Genetic
Engineering, Forest Ethics, and Sierra Club have
been getting involved and promoting the issue.
Posted by biodev at January 22, 2003 12:34 PM |
