Banning genetically modified (GM) food is just another example of promoters of “incumbent products” seeking to restrict competition argues Calestous Juma in yesterday’s Financial Times:
Take coffee: in the 1500s Catholic bishops demonised coffee as “Satan’s drink” and urged a ban. It was competing with wine. In its defence, Pope Clement VIII proclaimed: “Why, this ‘Satan’s drink’ is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptising it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”
More than a century later, coffee was pitted against tea as the incumbent English drink. To defeat the competition, King Charles II decreed the banning of coffeehouses in 1675 only to revoke the decision two days before it came into effect.
In Germany, coffee was outlawed or its sale severely restricted for economic reasons. “It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the like amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors,” declared Frederick the Great in 1777.
Historical cases of technological competition were limited in their reach. Today’s global economy demands that governments find ways to ensure that the benefits of new technologies are widely shared. Judicial rulings will safeguard the integrity of international trading rules. But they will not guarantee consumer enthusiasm for products that threaten their settled ways.
Calestous Juma was writting about a WTO finding, published earlier this week, that the current European Union moratorium on GM food crops breaches trade rules, click here for earlier post.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I have long held the view that beer and tobacco companies are behind the sinister deomonisation of crack, LSD and amphetamines.
I think I have found an ally in Jennifer Marohasy.
Maybe this could be a suitable topic for your next expose?
The best example of the anti-science movement yet – the demonisation of GM.
Yet Governments in Australia still make decisions based on either;
1. ignorance ( defined by JM as what you know which is incorrect)or,
2.political cowardice
You find those earnest , concerned types everywhere with their Monsanto conspiracies – amazing that they can have such an impact.
Steve Munn do you have any evidence for your theory or is it just another unsubstantiated allegation.
Steve, you draw too long a bow.
Actually I though Steve was very witty in a tongue-in-cheek, mock-evil Dadaist, Come on spinner sort of way, and the last two comments just missed his wit.
The Vatican has shares invested in disposable nappy companies, you know,
ROTFLOL
:o)
In the 1600’s the wine industry was dominated by the Monasteries. The Beer industry was the first to develop industrial scale operations. The Romans outlawed the wearing of Silk by anyone who was not a patrician because of the strain on gold reserves by the trade with China.
The vastly clever Dutch however, around the same time, devised a method to plump their gold reserves. They paid a confident young alchemist a princely sum to turn the sands of Holland into gold. They failed to realise that were this even possible, that gold would then have the value of, well, sand. His pockets heavier, the budding alchemist lost confidence in the enterprise and fled to England.
And the insurance industry has it roots in London’s coffee houses. (Newspapers too?) Fascinating stuff.
I love international trade issues. They’re beautiful. Pick one up and on one side, you see a fascinating cultural curiosity. On the other side, you see the glister of hard, spendable currency. If there wasn’t a money-side to the GM crops issue, it would be culturally on a par with hearing messages in Beatles songs when you play them backwards.
Ian,
The Dutch are vastly more clever than you suggest. The Netherlands is home to the largest multinational agricultural combines in Europe. For starters, these combines purchased a majority share of the farmland in the former East Germany that went on the market when the Wall came down.
The profits of these combines are, of course, threatened by cheap imports. The Netherlands also funnels more public funds to multinational anti-biotech activist groups than any other European nation.
It’s an open secret that activist groups are corporate shills hired to do trade-protectionist dirty work and with the WTO decision, money spent on anti-biotech activities will now be pretty much wasted. I eagerly anticipate seeing where the money will go next. I promise, it will be interesting.
Good to see you online Schiller.
Talking about the facination of Trade,in Australia, the really fascinating business episode is to see how Berri Fruit Juices’ head honcho Doug Shears and Genethics’ Bob Phelps were such close business comrades when Steven Druker came out to talk a few years back, and how Berri has a complementary marketing campaign to promote a huge business in pseudo-organic products that benefits so much fron PR “positioning” in a land of “Green and clean tranquil plains, dotted with happy sheep”, assisted greatly by Bob’s marketing acumen.
And how in several years, this close business partnership has never been transparently disclosed to the public, even though Bob routinely ask’s that of others.
The Dutch are certainly opportunists, snapping up all that land in E Germany. No doubt they thought they saw an opportunity to turn cheap land into gold 😉
The anti-GM campaigns have reached into the minds and purchase behaviours of consumers. Many producers are labelling their foods ‘no GM’ and importers are wary. Irrespective of a WTO ruling, markets and consumer perceptions will restrict GM imports.
Yes thats true Thinksy. But continuing that $ theme, where dollars really do matter is in the price of animal feed, and the cost penalties of GM nonsense in this area are a disincentive for the anti-GM marketing angles getting to out of hand on GM chicken and pig feed, even in Europe. Besides that, in objective health hazard terms the hazards are near to zero if not negative – eg health positive.
yeah it will be interesting to see what happens, esp with animal inputs (and the fact that there are more questions these days about how food inputs affect meat & cackleberries)
rog says: “Steve Munn do you have any evidence for your theory or is it just another unsubstantiated allegation.”
Nup. I was being flippant.
However if you put me on the IPA payroll I’m sure I’ll be able to find some somewhere. 🙂
Rog,
I’ll step in where Steve won’t. The evidence for Steve’s argument is thusly: if you’re an elected official in a democracy, you act and vote like an ignorant coward when greenie-whackos have advertising budgets bigger than your re-election campaign does, because the greenie-whackos will get you if you don’t push their message for them.
Q.E.D.
P.S. Democracy is just another pretty cultural curiosity that has buying power when you look on the flip-side. You know, Rog, people who treasure noble ideas shouldn’t look too close at things if they want to stay happy.
Steve is closer to the mark than he thinks. It was protectionism that gave us the war on drugs. William Randolph Hearst and DuPont conspired to demonise Hemp and make it illegal, protecting their paper mill and nylon/polyester markets respectively.
http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/hemp.html
And I should add that Steve is also correct that Tobacco and Alcohol companies are some of the most tenacious drug warriors around. They aren’t stupid, after all.
Returning to the thread of this topic coffee and GM crops.
Have someone else reacted against the newest fad promoted by upmarket coffee houses in Melbourne?
Organic coffee. The idea of growing coffee organically to increase the concentration of the many products of plant secondary metabolism that gives coffee its bitter taste is marketing gone mad.
One cup of coffee ( whether its organic or not)contains more naturally occuring carcinogens than we get from the pesticide residues on all the fruits and vegetables we eat in a year.
I’m looking forward to the day when the same coffee shops gives me the possibility of indulging in a cup of de-caf GM coffee preferably produced using the Australian GM lite technology developed by CSIRO.
I did read somewhere that the process of passing super heated steam thru coffee grounds (espresso) gives a pure drink – all heavy metals, chemicals etc are left in the grounds.
Of course it could be more twaddle put out by the cafe society.
One thing we can be sure of, Steve Munn did say that he could be bought.
I may add that I am a Dutchman and can trace my family back to 1316 AD around Deventer. That is when the records started, and at that time there were five Hissink families.
Judging from family physical traits, we are descendents of the original Batavi people.
But I never heard of the idiot proposal to turn sand into gold.
As yes we Dutch are excellent Merchants – we were the only Europeans allowed into Japan during the 17-18th centuries for one simple reason – we never mixed religion with business.
Yobbo,
And what were the political flavours of the US Administrations during that period?
Roger,
There is but one reason one drinks coffee – and it has nothing to so with taste or thirst.
Caffeine! 🙂
As for the carcinogens, considering the amount of coffee I drink, my age and my robust health, I remain a doubter.
My deceased father, a physician, also did experimental work on laboratory rats and mice. These are bred to be particurarly sensitive, and in some cases a sneeze is enough to have some mice develop cancer. John Brignell goes into more detail on the Number Watch.
But if coffee was a cancer inducing stimulant, I would have expected more coffee related deaths in the mortality statistics.
That said, 35 doppios in seriatum will cause heart failure in most normal individuals. I take 3 cups in the morning and that is it for the rest of the day.
The right to free speech on Jennifer’s blog, banned 2006.
Louis -> Becher [Beccher], Johann Joachim :
1678, went to Holland, sold the city of Haarlem a plan for a machine that would spool silk cocoons.
1679, sold the Dutch a method of extracting gold from sea sand.
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rhatch/pages/03-Sci-Rev/SCI-REV-Home/resource-ref-read/major-minor-ind/westfall-dsb/SAM-B.htm
“Becher recommended smelting silver thalers with sea-sand using certain salts as a flux. The Brabant thalers he used in his demonstrations probably contained small amounts of gold; see Karpenko, Chemistry and Metallurgy of Transmutation, p. 50. Gold can in fact be extracted conveniently from sand with the help of quicksilver – but only if the sand contains gold in the first place!
“(he) launched a scheme in the Netherlands for recovering gold from silver by means of sea sand. There were some ethical questions about this latter venture since Becher left the country before producing the promised gold, taking the funds of those who invested in the enterprise with him. He insisted on his sincerity, however, and returned some years later in the attempt to make good on his intentions. A second failure resulted in yet another alchemist being chased out of town. “
http://www.waldorflibrary.org/Journal_Articles/ChemistryRidenour.pdf
oh, if and only if the sand contained gold in the first place.
Thinksy, you have not written one original thought in your post above but cut and pasted, what you think, are relevant opinions.
So why not drop your disguise and appear as Phil Done?
Friends,
Coffee is, indeed, chock-full of carcinogens; at the same time, one cup of coffee has as many antioxidants (said to prevent cancer) as one dozen fresh oranges!
Also, on a whim, I bought myself some “Organic Fair-Trade Shade-Grown Coffee.” I got whole roasted beans, as I like to grind my own. Fresh-ground makes an incredible difference in flavor.
So I made some of that coffee. It tasted like the awful percolator brew you find in the break room at the rubber tire factory that’s been cooking since the end of Wednesday’s second shift. Gack! I’d swear off caffeine completely if that’s all I had to drink. No wonder international greenie-whacko pressure groups had to force Starbuck’s to add it to their offerings. Nobody with taste-buds would do it voluntarily.
Louis: Hard to say on a state-by-state basis but since it was post-new deal I think we can assume that the politics of the time were not particularly libertarian.
Regardless, I don’t think it changes my point that protectionism and wilful scientific ignorance are the reasons behind both the illogical ban on GM foods and the equally illogical ban on Hemp cultivation.
Schiller you’re obviously getting the wrong stuff. I have tasted both organic and non-organic over the past few months and the difference between them is obvious. I’m going to keep the taste test going to make sure I’m not imagining it, and extend it to friends as well. And the places I drink it supply it on the menu voluntarily. Starbucks (I’ve never frequented the place) probably shied away for so long because it costs more – it’s a multinational, after all.
Any reason I just got the following message before I posted my (subsequently-edited) comment?
“Your comment was denied for questionable content.”
Petal: Try a blind taste test then come back to us. Taste testing when you know what you’re drinking already is hopeless.
I wouldn’t say it’s “hopeless” but it’s certainly not within the realms of scientific rigour. The (organic) coffee I drank this morning sure met the standard!
It could also be surmised that the opposition to coffee at that time was because it was the beverage of the Saracens – bloody Arabs.
I was first introduced to premium coffees in 1982. My early favorite was Kenya AA, but I found I liked a darker roast, and for some reason nobody I could find offered a dark roast Kenya. So I gravitated to the French and Italian roasted blends and for a while dabbled in Papua-New Guinea, which is quite brisk. I’ve since settled on Columbian Supremo.
Now this is a long way of saying, I don’t need a double-blind taste test to tell good coffee, any more than a wino has to swap brown bags with his buddies to tell the difference between Frapple and Night Train Express.
And this is an even longer way of saying, the organic industry has things hopelessly *wrong*. It’s not *how* you produce it, it’s what the product *is*. And organic coffee might be pollinated by endangered songbirds for all I care, but it ferdangsher makes a lousy cuppa and costs way more.
Schiller.