Eating in the Dark America's Experiment With Genetically Engineered Food

Chapter 1 FORCE-FED CONSUMERS In the early morning hours of Sunday, September 28, 1997, a small band of citizens crept into a field in County Carlow, fifty miles south of Dublin. Illuminated by the glow of yellow lights from a nearby industrial plant, they set about slashing and digging up every genetically modified sugar beet that had been planted by Monsanto on the one-acre plot. The following morning an anonymous caller from a previously unknown group identifying itself as the Gaelic Earth Liberation Front left a message with the Genetic Engineering Network in London. The caller said, "This was the first genetically engineered crop in Ireland, and hopefully it will be the last." Word of the sabotage against Monsanto's experimental crop spread quickly across Ireland. Patricia McKenna, Ireland's Green Party member of the European Parliament, applauded the activists, tellingThe Irish Timesthat they deserved "full praise." Officials at the government-sponsored research site in Carlow condemned the vandalism. The nation's relatively young biotechnology organization, the Irish BioIndustry Association (IBIA), also deplored the act and noted that it is not the sort of thing that happens very often in Ireland. One of the "Carlow diggers," as the activists became known, later said the Gaelic Earth Liberation Front was "not a group with a constituted membership." Rather, several concerned citizens had come together somewhat spontaneously to rid the countryside of mutant plants that they believed posed an immediate and unacceptable threat to their future security. "At the end of the action there was no sudden sense of great achievement and no real celebrations, instead there was something simpler, a feeling that we came, we dug and we made Ireland GE free again," a self-proclaimed participant said in a letter posted on the Internet. "We all believe that a future untainted by runaway biological pollution is a future worth fighting for. This isn't terrorism, it's realism." Many law-abiding Irish consumers supported the Carlow action. Five months earlier, on May 1, 1997, the Irish Environmental Protection Agency had granted Monsanto the first license in Ireland for a deliberate release of genetically modified organisms into the environment. Theretofore research on genetically engineered bacteria and plants had been performed indoors, under tightly controlled conditions, to prevent birds, bees, butterflies, and breezes from spreading pollen and seeds produced by gene-altered crops into the countryside. Clare Watson had started the anti-genetic engineering group Genetic Concern! in April 1997 to fight Monsanto's proposed outdoor field experiment through legal channels. She immediately sought a high court review of the Irish EPA's decision. The court granted her request for a review but declined to issue an injunction preventing Monsanto from planting its sugar beets, which were genetically engineered to resist dousing by the company's weed-killer Roundup. Monsanto put its experimental sugar beet crop into the ground on May 27, 1997. The high court's legal review of the EPA's license decision was not scheduled to begin until December 10, 1997, by which time the genetically modified sugar beets would have been harvested. Sugar is a biennial crop and doesn't generally flower in its first year, although it does occasionally happen (when it is called "bolting"). This was the risk that worried Genetic Concern! "Why are the Irish so passionate about this issue?" I later asked Clare Watson and Quentin Gargan, a spokesperson for Genetic Concern! and owner of a health food business. "The public is frightened by the complexity of the issue," answered Watson, who grew up on an organic farm in Cork. "The issue of control over the food supply, too, grows out of the history of the potato famine. Who'Hart, Kathleen is the author of 'Eating in the Dark America's Experiment With Genetically Engineered Food' with ISBN 9780375420702 and ISBN 0375420703.