mouth epidemics in which profiteering cost-cutting and poorly-regulated mass operations led to both tragedies) � the Third Way continues in energetic obedience to the program for world corporate rule. The global market�s command economy of minimum costs to corporations and maximum exter�na�lization onto others, of guaranteed high returns by transnational control of factors of production, and of monopoly-patent technology across economic and state sectors has �no alternative,� we are assured. If the public becomes increasingly less secure in its life goods, political spin is all they will get in response. The case of GMOs � which British people still lead the English-speaking world in rejecting � is a revealing demonstration of the ongoing war between the public interest and this transnational corporate agenda.

Counter-Indicative Research Suppressed

Corporations do no precautionary research on the long-term effects of genetically-engineered food on people who consume these products, nor on the ecological effects of these reproducing GMOs on the environment.1 Although genetically modified organisms dominate and colonize other seed stocks, unlike chemical inputs into foods, the danger of chain-effects has not been remotely tested by their producers or suppliers before releasing them into the food chain.2 It is therefore no exaggeration to say that both human beings and their life-host are guinea pigs for the GMO global experiment � as in other matters.

Dr. Arpad Pusztai�s research in 1997-98 at the Rowett Research Institute in Scotland, however, showed an entirely unexpected side effect of severe gastrointestinal tract damage to rats eating genetically modified potatoes. Although firmly a pro-GMO researcher, Dr. Pusztai, with the Institute�s permission, revealed his government-financed findings on a 150-second interview on Granada TV. There was an instant scorched-earth response. The data was confiscated, and the laboratory was closed to the experimenter. The 67-year-old scientist was issued with a gag order, suspended from his senior scientific position, deprived of his $1.4 million research grant, and publicly denounced by New Labour�s Parliamentary Committee on Science and Technology. As Pusztai declared later, �I can say from my experience that if anyone dares to say anything even slightly contra-indicative, they are vilified and destroyed.� Pusztai�s co-researcher wrote me in subsequent correspondence in October 2000 that their research was �potentially stopped by the highest office in the country, although denied by 10 Downing Street.�

Pusztai�s research was, nevertheless, published by one of the world�s most prestigious medical research journals (Lancet, October 16, 1999). The truth of the matter did not occasion any apology, change of course, or policy reconsideration by �New Labour.� That an aroused British citizen resistance to GMOs kept increasing simultaneously with scientific support for health and contamination concerns did not deter the Third Way either. Indeed, a sudden New Labour edict in February 2001 dramatically and unexpectedly doubled the permitted sites of GMO experimentation to 96 sites as the scientific and public demand for segregation of the contaminating crops grew. The Blair agriculture ministry then provided the sop of �an enlarged perimeter� of 90 metres around crops, although seed contamination was known to exist in practice to over 3500 metres and predicted in much wider range by biologists and ecologists.

Since the accompanying fact of foot-and-mouth disease indicated the possibility that air-and vector-borne contaminated pollen could spread by wind over many miles, it was not clear why 90 metres around an open-air plot would be sufficient to prevent this aerial and vector contamination by mutant pollen at the very time that the foot-and-mouth epidemic was spreading through 450 miles.3

Economic Rationality and the Policy of Deliberate Contamination

The 90-meter perimeter was not and is not, in fact, sufficient to prevent contamination by airborne pollen spread from open fields of genetically-engineered plants. As Saskatchewan farmer, Croft Woodruff, a victim of GMO degradation of his crops, wrote to Prime Minister Blair on March 13, 2001, from his direct experience (I quote from the copy to me): �Montsanto [the lead GMO-commodity producer] knew its GE [genetically engineered] seeds would cross pollinate, that gene flow was uncontrollable � the GE altered gene is always the dominant gene, which means the loss of seed varieties and biodiversity.� Since Woodruff like other Canadian farmers had experienced an average income drop of 50% revenue drop from trying to sell GE food crops to a collapsing international market in which British grocery chains refused to market known GMO products, there was a deep problem. Demand for organic produce was exponentially growing at the same time beyond farmers� ability to fulfil it. Huge financial commitments had been made to GE food production in prospect of market control as had already been gained with 70% of soya and 81% of maize sales. The US and GMO corporations (like Cargill, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Zoh) were, however, losing market share to a groundswell international movement of NOT-GMO. An emergency, called �threat� in the management lexicon before it happens, was thus declared in agribusiness boardrooms.

The clear market trend indicated a rational strategy that no-one external to the involved corporations was told or had conceived of. The shareholder maximizing way to deal with this problem would be to continue to allow contamination of the increasingly more desired non-GE crops �within the law� permitted by the British government. Contamination of non-GE seeds to protect collapsing market share is a strategy which follows from the axiom of �rationality� now regulating market decisions. The fiduciary duty to maximize the returns of shareholders, indeed, entails such a business strategy. �Business-friendly government,� correspondingly, entails not preventing shareholder gains within the law. Bear in mind the scientific fact that GMOs contaminate with no boundary to their movement across open agricultural lands, and that their always-dominant genes predictably colonize non-GMO seed varieties with no identifiable limit to this extinction of rapidly shrinking