NEWS April 27 2001
Feeding or Fooling the World?

Some of the events that took place around the World Agriculture 2020 Conference at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. Tickets were £300 which made this debate on the future of agriculture rather an exclusive affair, so alternative events took place.

Public meeting organised by the 2020 Vision collective
Wednesday 18th saw a highly charged public meeting - ‘Feeding or Fooling the World’ - with speakers such as the Indian trade and agriculture journalist, Devinder Sharma, two women farmers from the Deccan Development Group from South India, Patrick Mulvany from the ITDG and surprise guest, Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian canola farmer who was successfully sued by Monsanto for supposedly planting GM crops on his land without a license agreement. Percy claims that the GM crops found on his land were probably due to GM pollen blowing on to his land from a neighbour’s farm and from stray seeds growing in ditches by the road alongside his farm. This road leads to a canola processing factory. His passionate speech about Monsanto’s intimidation of him and other farmers into growing their GM Roundup Ready seeds was a shocking and cautionary tale to all UK farmers thinking of growing GM seeds. He can no longer use farm-saved seed varieties that have been developed during his 50 years of farming as they are tainted with genetic material from Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds through cross pollination. This legally makes them Monsanto’s seeds - so he would need a contract to grow them! Percy intends to appeal against the decision and countersue for damage to his crops by Monsanto’s genetic material. Further details on www.percyschmeiser.com

On Thursday evening protesters assembled outside the dining room of the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, where the John Innes Centre were wining and dining pro-GM conference delegates behind the Centre’s huge plate glass wall. Protesters scaled the building and let down two massive banners, facing inwards towards the big window. These read, ‘Our food, our future: Industrial Agriculture is not the answer’ and ‘Biohazard!’ At ground level 40-50 other protesters made a serious racket with drums, whistles and football rattles for over two hours.

The JIC organisers apparently advised those at the top table to mingle with the lesser delegates and then waited for the demonstrators to disperse, or be dispersed, in order to proceed. But while the police were present, they respected the good-natured character of the protest and stayed low key without intervening.

By 9.30 those within were obviously getting rather hungry and the (possibly somewhat overcooked!) main course finally got served. One demonstrator reported how at one point during the evening, an African delegate was handed a bun, looked quizzically at it, then up at the big ‘bio-hazard’ banner, before finally exchanging a grin with protesters. We don’t know whether he summoned up the courage to eat it but reports from within the JIC conference have indicated that, fittingly enough, the quality of the food being served at the event has so far been truly execrable. And these people want us to let them feed the world?