George Monbiot covers, in the latter part of The Captive State, his criticisms of the New World [Economic] Order's attitude to environment and the sciences. He then takes a look at the international aspects of the issues raised in the book, and concludes with a brief chapter on constructive methods of fighting back.

Hardcover jacket, PanMacmillan, 2000

The environmental and science issues come together in a chapter on Monsanto's Magic Potion. For those readers who have been living on the moon, Monsanto produced 'Round-Up Ready' strains of rape and maize. What the plants were ready for was high levels of herbicide, enabling farmers to eradicate weeds with less damage to crops. The ability of crops to resist commonly used (or, preferably, Monsanto manufactured) pesticides and herbicides might enhance production, but has terrible implications for the environment and for human health. It was, therefore, 'obvious' that Monsanto's genetic engineering was something that should be restricted by the government.

That the government was not willing to restrict Monsanto, and companies like them, despite the public condemnation of GM in general, and of Monsanto in particular, is the subject of this part of the book. Why was the government so complacent about public health and the ecologist's precautionary principle? It will be little surprise to find that the reason revolves around international corporate control of national government. The pro-GM lobby launched what Monbiot describes as:

"...a daring attempt by a handful of multinational companies to turn the food chain into a controllable commodity, to manoeuvre themselves into a position from which they can determine not only what the people of the world eat, but also whether they eat... [In Britain] I document the extraordinary web of contacts linking biotechnology companies, government ministers and governmental agencies, and the misrepresentations and public relations strategies the government has deployed as a result."

Monbiot outlines the case of rBST, a genetically engineered growth hormone affecting milk yields in cows. This hormone is a known cause of lameness, birth defects, and other extreme reactions in cattle. It is widely held that the human response to rBST in milk would also be negative. Another angle is that, as one of the reactions in cattle is mastitis, which is controlled with antibiotics, the increased use of antibiotics could make bacteria immunity increase, once again negatively affecting human health. The industry has had remarkable success in getting scientists to speak out in their favour, despite the evidence (the US FDA, for example, has promoted use of the hormone). This is a common feature of the relationship between science, industry and truth.

The ex-US President, Bill Clinton, has aided industry, warning Tony Blair in 1998 that "the EU's slow and non-transparent approval process for genetically modified organisms has cost US exporters hundreds of millions in lost sales... In the spirit of increased US-EU regulatory co-operation, we urge the EU to take immediate action to ensure that these products receive a timely review." When public pressure keeps 'progress' slow, the US threatens trade disputes. Because, of course, any nation or nations that have local policies that restrict the trade in poisonous agri-chemicals and experimental GM products is creating a fetter on 'free trade'. This is a kind of pressure that works for the corporations. The high profile of the US government in the battle to force GM products onto unwilling Europeans should not fool people into missing the fact that it is really corporate power that underpins these disputes.

The financial stakes, in the GM and gene patenting debate, are enormous. Monbiot's next chapter looks more closely at the reasons behind the incredible effort that biotech companies have invested in genetics. "By patenting the technology required to make the gene transfer, or, better still, by patenting the genes themselves, companies can lay claim to the variety they have engineered as if it were no more than a mechanical invention. They can, in other words, claim ownership of life." Further, they are even up for patenting genes from non-engineered lifeforms, so that others must pay them if they undertake manipulation of plants that they may have been growing for thousands of years. In 1996, Robert Fraley, of Monsanto, boasted "What you're seeing is not just a consilidation of seed companies, it's really a consolidation of the entire food chain." Monbiot explains, with this example: Monsanto... owns a patent on all genetically engineered cotton: any cotton treated with any gene, by any company, for any purpose, now and in the future, belongs to Monsanto." Even human genes can be owned in this way!

Monbiot details the efforts made by the British government to open up markets to the GM agri-industry. Under the last Conservative government, for example, the chemical glyphosate (an organophosphate, harmful to human health) had its 'safe' level raised by 200 times. There was no medical reason to allow this change, which was a benefit only to Monsanto, as it is the active ingredient in the Roundup herbicide. This is absorbed by the plants that it is sprayed onto (soya plants especially), and then consumed by us. The industry has lobbied hard to ensure that the consumer cannot tell the difference between soya products sprayed with Roundup and those that have not been. It has fought to ensure that countries do not allow labelling, preferably making it illegal.

Thus it is that commercial considerations take precedence over health considerations, though industry and government (can you tell them apart?) insist that they allow decisions only on the basis of science. However, this 'science' is seriously compromised. The word 'Professor' in front of someone's name is no indication of that person's objectivity or neutrality. Outright lies and misinformation is rife. Monbiot makes mention of the smearing of Organic food as being more likely to cause food poisoning than other crops. This was a renewed scare only last week. However, organic standards are regularly much higher than those adhered to by conventional farmers. Monbiot uses the next chapter to look into the issue of 'scientific objectivity'.

The compromising of the sciences in Britain has come about through the nexus of industry, academe, and the need for profit. Although the country has a reputation for scientific discovery, it is perceived as being a rarity for Britain to cash in on its discoveries. In the global economy it is no surprise that there is pressure on Britain to perform in this area. Hi-tech industry has hit upon a formula for success in Britain, through influencing government allocation of funding and becoming the prime financiers and backers of university science departments (or at least of those that agree to focus on areas that industry sees immediate profit in). Needless to say, this approach also financially punishes those who wish to focus on environmental harm caused by those industries. It also takes funds away from areas of research that industry does not perceive to have an immediate and obvious cash prize for them attached to it.

There are, of course, other implications for science. Some researchers find funding and career enhancement through research programes that have a fixed result in mind, regardless of the facts. The fixed result, naturally, is that the, say, pollution concerned is not harmful at all, or that, if it is, it is not caused by the sponsors of the department conducting the research. Government also has a role to play in easing the burden of truth for industry. An example Monbiot uses relates to a government paper on public health, Saving Lives: Our Healthier Nation: "The only atmospheric pollution named in the report is radon. It also happens to be one of the only pollutants in Britain which does not result from the activities of large corporations: it is naturally occuring. The report warns us about the dangers of cancer resulting from 'exposure to radon gas in certain homes or excessive sunlight', but nuclear power stations are not mentioned, and nor are any other chemicals, even though the paper concludes that 'Pollutants in the environment may cause cancer if inhaled or swallowed'."

Last week, while discussing planning issues, I said that I would provide another example of the compromised nature of planning acceptance in the UK. That example was municipal incineration. Over the last few years the government and the South East region have been pursuing the development of at least five large municipal incinerators in the region. These have almost all been proposed in sites that have excellent communications to the continent, or will have shortly (eg: Newhaven, its ferry port; Redhill, the M25 / M26 / M20 Dover connection; Maidstone [or Allington], the M20 Dover connection [both these latter leading to ferry and rail links]; the Hastings [or Mountfield], the sure to be built East-West bypass, offering connection to Folkestone, Dover and Newhaven). No incinerator would get initial permission to import, but most other ones in this country have managed to do so on application later, when, so to speak, no-one was looking (see Waste Not, Want Not, by Robert Allen, Earthscan). They have also generated much local opposition. In the case of Maidstone, the opposition was on mixed grounds, including traffic increase, water table proximity, and dioxin and heavy-metal pollution. It was obvious very early on that the authorities, left and right, had no intention of halting the development. The Euro MP (Labour) was transparently in favour of the incinerator. The DETR had no intention of calling it in for a public inquiry (indeed, while much of Europe, and a few areas in the UK, like the Isle of Wight are moving away from the concept, it is the Labour government's typically out-of-date view that incineration is a good way to deal with 'our' [we all know that that also means Europe's] waste problems). It was also obvious that the town's (Conseervative) MP was biased. Anne Widecombe said that she an open mind on the matter, but all contact with her, especially during a large public meeting she attended in Allington, made it plain that the developers' were 'objective' and those in opposition to the plans were bolshy 'greens' and 'NIMBY's'. The respectable local people involved were, for the most part, neither of these things. They were, indeed, generally conservative, though some may have come to question their received viewpoints as they banged their heads against an inceasingly rough brick wall. Things were hardly helped by the fact that the local press had an interest in having the incinerator built, as it could burn its highly toxic inks and solvents there.

The incineration issue is an area where the role of scientific data has become especially compromised. This is true of assessments of heavy metals and particulates, but also of organochlorines (dioxins and furans), which is the area that I shall illustrate. There is a 'weight-of-evidence' approach in UK courts when deciding upon pollution issues. This means more-or-less literally what it says. If a judge is confronted with a tonne of paper from one side in the argument, and two-&-a-half tonnes from the other, it is the latter that will invariably be found in favour of. The latter group is almost always the establishment, or industrial community. They are the ones that can fund reports, and control the 'objective scientific' content of reports. Environmental pressure groups, and local communities are rarely able to afford the cash to hire independent scientists to commission reports from - hence they can produce less 'evidence'. It is obvious that the actual scientific content of evidence is at best a secondary concern here. The judge, if not already on-side as a lobbied and networked pillar of the establishment, may have a quick glance at some of the reports, but the volume of paperwork presented will usually mitigate a 'proper' examination of the evidence (and the judge will more often than not be a non-specialist). This allows those commissioned by industry to produce a report that is fairly 'truthful' in its overall text, but that uses opening and closing arguments that are misleading. There are several 'acceptable' methods of acheiving this, some of which I illustrate below.

For example, the Canadian toxicology group, Cantox Inc., was able to provide papers in 1993, Scientific Principles for Evaluating the Potential for Adverse Effects from Chlorinated Organic Chemicals in the Environment, which drew firm conclusions regarding the safety of dioxins in the environment. They conclude that they were pretty safe. There is ample evidence that this is not so. Much of it is in the report! The basic tool used to conclude that the adverse effects of organochlorines are not significant enough to require action against industry from regulatory bodies is the logical framework within which facts are marshalled, coupled with an obfuscatory way of presenting unarguable facts that are negative to the sponsors. This varies from statistical distortions, through disengenously using specially chosen oppositional views to knock (ie: sloppy reports that can be easily refuted on methodological rather than factual grounds), to choosing criteria to prove causal links between the release of a compound and negative health consequences that they are already sure cannot produce such a link ( even when they know of other criteria that can). This is known as first order error. All these tools are used by CanTox in concluding no such links.

The statistical approach here allows the conflation of the different types of organo-chlorine, whose overall statistical toxicity is relatively low (partly because many have an unkown and therefore zero-rated toxicity), despite the knowledge that the family of chemicals includes some of the most carcinogenic compounds known to man (and for the most part only produced by man). The criteria used to prove causality are the most annoying in this report. Obviously, some such logical criteria must apply in order for the report to be described as scientific. But the choice made here loads the dice, and CanTox know it. They look for a temporal link between the release of chemicals to the environment and human sickness. That is to say, they say they are looking for a consistent length of time between contamination and the expression of symptoms from person to person. Dioxins accumulate in fatty tissues, and only cause the worst damage when released from those tissues. Since release is lifestyle dependent it is already known that there will be no consistent period of time between exposure and possible sickness from person to person. The logical tools chosen to 'prove' toxicity are therefore known in advance to be irrelevant in this case. (The lifestyle dependence here relates to the use of fat deposits in different individuals: some will release them by dieting, some by other illness, some not at all for a long time - and some through pregnancy and breast feeding, where the offending chemicals are discharged into another being than the one initially exposed, ie; a baby).

And who sponsored this report? Grants were provided by the Chlorine Institute, the Chlorine Coordinating Council, the Vinyl Institute, the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance, Euro Chlor Federation, and the European Council of Vinyl Manufacturers. This level of compromise is not uncommon. In fact, as Monbiot's report on university funding makes clear, it is hard to see how this level of compromise could be anything other than all-encompassing.

    George Monbiot, as seen on the fly of The Captive State & on his Guardian web page.

Next up, Monbiot looks at the global policy iniatatives of transnational corporations. It is becoming the norm in Become the Media to discuss global finance and the pressures that are exerted on ordinary communities. Monbiot draws all his arguments about the corporate takeover of Britain together, inevitably, in a chapter on just this subject. He traces the attempts by corporations, over the last couple of decades, to introduce to the global economy a new 'free market' rule-book. Through GATT, the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MIA), the WTO, and on to current backdoor routes, he describes the encroachment of corporate power on community autonomy. Trade "blocs would, eventually, be connected and 'harmonized' to establish a single, deregulated global market, in which, opponeents feared, the laws protecting human rights and the environment would be progressively unpicked." It is not global rules that cause the problems, of course. They are required, in order to stop the big boys trampling the small boys. However, the corporate globalization agenda has no such goal in mind. The rules that they not only propose, but force upon us, do cause the problems - always insisting that they are concerned with fairness! If a chemical is banned in one country (because it is proven or suspected to be toxic), then 'free trade' insists that it must be marketed in that country, and global pressure will be exerted to open up that lucrative market. In Britain attempts to ban GM foods on the basis of the precautionary principle have been met with exactly this kind of opposition. One wonders where the people working for corporations propose to live, as they are shitting in their own beds, as well as ours. Pollution cannot, ultimately, discriminate. William Burroughs once suggested that the rulers are aliens, that breathe and thrive in the toxic-to-humans air that their industry produces!

"But perhaps most alarming was the scope of the powers multinational companies would be able to wield over democratically elected governments. They would be allowed to sue them, not only for losses already suffered, but also for the loss of the profits they might have made had the law in question not existed. The draft [MAI] agreement, remarkably, defined these imaginery profits as the companies' inalienable property. The right to sue would be confined to 'investors', which, in practice, means multinational companies. Governments, communities or ordinary citizens would have no new reciprocal rights to hold corporations to account." Big Business could grow like Topsy, while their imposed trade rules undermined environmental, health, safety and consumer protection rules. "World trade rules could, in principle, be used to dismantle the Montreal Protocol protecting the ozone layer, the Basel Convention on the shipment of hazardous wastes, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species." They would fight useful levels of 'minimum' wage, and labour organisations, in an effort to reduce staffing costs world-wide, leaving the newly embeggared First World peoples to wonder who exactly they were selling goods to!

Tony Blair's New Labour has advocated this liberalization of trade as necessary, and as inevitable. That of course is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Monbiot points out, it is opposition that may quash these corporate efforts, not acquiescence. The anti-globalization protests, as Become the Media has noted before, have been successful in putting trade agreements on the public agenda. But they have not made the inroads that some like to believe, as the official trade rules agreements are only one, high profile, route to corporate control. Already, the Maastricht Treaty on European Union has become a ratified agenda for a Euro trade bloc with strong ties to a US trade bloc. Opposition to European Union in the UK has almost invariably revolved around petty questions of sovereignty and patriotism, rather than around the terms of Union. Those who see the UK's future for what it is, a depleted and over-populated island, do not have such a problem with Union of the peoples of Europe - and they are obliged to resist Union under the terms offered in Maastricht and Nice. The European Round Table of Industrialists is an association of the chief execs of 46 of Europe's biggest companies, and they have a single market agenda for Europe.

They also have the ear of the Labour government. In 1997, Blair approved a project to establish the US-EU trade bloc that the ERT and others 'need'. "Any product or practise approved in one place would become acceptable in both. The lowest standards in either trading bloc, in other words, would be applied universally. [...]This meant that European people would have to accept American laws, even though they could not exercise influence over the legislators who passed them." Although this round of such plans were successfully opposed, with Blair's attitiude it is hard to see this as any more than a Pyrrhic victory. In 1998 the same basic plan was placed on the agenda in yet another guise. The Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), no doubt pronounced 'tabbard', appears to be the latest vehicle, with the US Under-Secretary of Commerce stating that "virtually every market-opening move undertaken by the United States and the EU in the last couple of years has been suggested by the TABD." Monbiot warns that "Elected representatives will, if these plans for a new world order succeed, be reduced to the agents of a global government: built, coordinated and run by corporate chief executives." Though, it seems to me, it already practically is.

In many ways the last chapter is the least good in this otherwise excellent book. It is hardly surprising, since this chapter is the one where Monbiot attempts to see a way out of the crisis. It is a Sisyphean task, as every success is followed by the rich multinationals finding another way to plunge the rock back down. The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance, say the Americans, who appear to have forgotten to mean it. It is clear that in the UK the concepts of citizenship and individual empowerment are more or less meaningless to most. And yet it is our active participation in opposition that, if other nations' people join us, can save us. Monbiot advises a number of potential fixes, that in aggregate would help defer corporate takeover (if it is not already too late). But this instrumentalism requires that the tools needed to do it be controlled by us. It is precisely these tools that are not controlled by us - government, the UN, the establishment old boy's club, etc... have their hands firmly clenched on them.

Given our lack of constitutional rights and representative democracy I fail to see how piecemeal institutional reform can achieve the ends required of it. And the results of other methods of attaining community control tend to create power vacuums that the most violent and unscrupulous tend to fill. This defeatist sounding response to Monbiot's efforts is by way of criticising his proposals. They are overly optimistic in the context of his narrow prescriptions. The chapter seriously needs beefing up. It would take a lot more space to address these issues properly, and, perhaps, Monbiot may be giving it that space in the, delayed, papercover edition. The instrumentalist approach advocated could not get far without wide ranging changes in public attitudes, not just in the UK, but in communities all over Europe and America. The media, which is the only conduit for such change, is out of the hands of those most concerned to institute change. There are of course exceptions, Monbiot's The Captive State / Nation Without a State being among them. But many more of us are needed to roll that stone! Attaining "global trade agreements which set harmonized minimum standards, rather than only harmonized maximum standards" is the least of it. Monbiot, however, is definately in the ball-park. I leave the last word to him:

"Where are the powers which could make these propositions viable? Well, dear reader, they lie with you. [...] Our strength... lies in our citizenship, in our ability to engage in democratic politics, to use exposure, enfranchisement and dissent to prise our representatives out of the arms of the powers they have embraced. We must, in other words, cause trouble. we must put the demo back into democracy."