Today I am going up to the Catskills to have lunch with Ford and look for log sections to use as molds for one of my nutty chair designs. There are fallen trees on his property, so I might get lucky. Sam and his wife Sandy join me.
On the drive up to the Catskills Sam, who has an agrigenetics company, discusses his business and his recent trip to Uzbekistan. He went there on business, to see if he could find a market for some genetically modified cotton seed. But he also was curious about that whole region. As a primer I recommended the book The Great Game as a history of that region — I hadn't started reading yet. Having both now read the book (I'm not quite finished) we're both amazed at the parallels with current events:
The British (and sometimes Russian) assumptions that they will be welcomed with open arms, the continuous installing of compliant rulers, often with complete disregard for the opinion of the people... the resort to military force and bribery to win the acquiescence of local Khans and tribal leaders — which in the end usually ended in betrayal and outright failure. We wonder if anyone in the Bush administration is aware of or has read this book (it's THE historical primer on the region.) I think their reading is like their "intelligence" — it's essentially data mining, a way of confirming and supporting what you already believe.
We discuss the dilemma that agrigenetics has to deal with. Farmers in many 3rd world countries, who would love to use fewer insecticides — to save money and to prevent their land from becoming more inundated with chemicals than it already is — and to have higher yields, are very attracted to modified seeds. These farmers are used to keeping a portion of their seed each year for planting the next growing season.
Yet the companies, like Sam's, prefer to sell seeds that are altered to genetically prevent the expression of genetically modified traits, such as insect resistance — by incorporating what are called gene protection technologies (the infamous Terminator genes are of this type) and the like so that the seeds of the plants don’t inundate surrounding fields, possibly wiping our some biodiversity.
At least that's what they say. The other effect of using sterile seeds is that the farmers have to purchase new seeds every growing season. They become addicted to the value of the product — the farmer can always still plant the original, unengineered product at no cost.
I mention that I'd heard that sterile seeds were not 100% sterile, that some small percentage can and do escape and mingle with crops in the surrounding fields. Sam says he's never heard of this happening, and hadn't heard of sterile seeds being used by farmers, so I guess I'll have to back up my suspicions and rumors. Sam said that "it is statistically probable that pollen will travel and cross breed with other plants of the species and mutants will occur, as well, once a plant variety is introduced into nature, so that escape will occur — the question is the severity of the consequence of this once it occurs."
When told that the Americans would have to let their product be vetted through local government channels the Uzbekis seemed nonplussed — they said, in effect, "we'll take care of our government permissions etc." — which sounded suspicious to Sam, whereupon they insisted that the right thing be done legal-wise.
Sam also insisted that they establish a regulatory system, which prompted one government official to say "...well, that's not what we want, and we can just buy from the Chinese."
At any rate, Sam's seeds were of no use to the Uzbekis — their growing season is too short for the North American bred seeds, which I guess need a longer growing time. So he said he decided to make the best of the situation, realizing that the seeds the Uzbekis were using grew faster than the NA versions — there might be a profit in buying seeds from the Uzbekis instead of selling seeds to them.
Apart from the issue of the relative safety, danger and globalization issues surrounding GM seeds is the whole issue of legal contracts and recourse. We see a contract as binding, one is more or less honor bound to abide by it and there are built in recourses if it is broken.
Sam maintains that this attitude just doesn't exist in many other parts of the world. He and his partners bought an existing seed company in India, and the seller seemed pleased, almost ecstatic at their windfall and monetary gains. Sam and Co were happy too, until they discovered that the folks they bought the company from had now started a new company that was almost identical to the one they'd just sold. To Sam this wasn't playing fair, but they soon found out that despite clauses in the contract of sale that forbade such enterprises there was pragmatically not much they could do.
I mentioned that although I would like to believe that the law is an integral part of the society and government in any democracy, it often is more flexible that one might like.
To my advantage the initial Talking Heads record contract, which wasn't all that good for us, was renegotiated very soon after it appeared the band was going to succeed. The contract had not expired, but the idea of keeping all the partners and parties happy outweighed sticking to the letter of the law. In this case the flexibility worked to my advantage.
To many folks' disadvantage we often discover that should you have a disagreement with a large company there is not much you can do about it, given the high cost of legal affairs in this country. In effect might makes right, though one would hope that word eventually gets around and eventually the bad guys get their comeuppance — but that's wishful thinking on many cases... and it's usually too late to be of much use to many of aggrieved.
So where is justice?
Maybe the law is not the a hard and fast thing it appears to be, maybe it's more like quantum physics —a statistical probability that a thing will exist in a certain form and state, but one can never predict for certain the existence of a specific thing or state at a specific time. The law functions more or less as it's supposed to and people behave as if there are laws and structures governing their relationships, but only a given percentage of these are actually adhered to — enough to keep a society and state in line in many cases, in others, not.
I wonder if the behavior of the Indians is not much different than the behavior of lots of American companies — it's just more overt. Though one wonders how much more overt one could be than the various Tycos, Enrons and other companies who defrauded the public of billions and for the most part have gotten away with it, in fact some of them are rewarded with political office!
