THE GM BACKLASH HAS FINALLY TAKEN ROOT IN THE USA, AND CROP-PULLING ACTIVISTS ARE IN THE VANGUARD. JONATHAN OUERLING REPORTS.

FOR QUITE SOME time during the anti-GMO frenzy in Europe, it was common to hear activists asking the question 'why isn't this happening in the US?' America, the home of the GM revolution, was, it seemed, notoriously slow to catch up with Europe in the consumer and activist backlash against GM crops.

Yet this is not the whole story; for resistance to genetic modification (GM) in agriculture has grown steadily in North America over the last two years, and has now reached a significant level.

One interesting tactic that has taken root strongly is an export from none other than Britain: the practice of 'night-time gardening' also known as GM crop-pulling. Since November 1998, there have been roughly 40 of these events in 9 different states and provinces spread across the continent.

The first known instance of this type of protest occurred in California as far back as 1987, when a crop of transgenic strawberries were 'decontaminated' in a field near the San Francisco Bay Area on the night before a major press conference by the group Earth First!. While the action was a success in terms of destroying the actual experiment, the corporation won a PR victory by putting the plants back in the ground and claiming they were still alive and that nothing had happened! This type of action was repeated two years later by another one in the US, which in turn inspired a one-off night-time gardening incident in Holland.

The first series of anti-GM direct actions in Europe took place throughout Germany in 1996, followed next year by dozens of incidents in several countries, most notably the UK. By 1998, a campaign against GM foodstuffs was in full swing in Europe as well as other parts of the world. Yet people in North America were hardly even aware that the majority of food products sold in grocery stores contained GM ingredients. This scenario was to change swiftly.

Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro started that year on a confident note, proclaiming that genetic engineering was the 'single most successful introduction of technology in the history of agriculture, including the plough.' The company's financial future looked promising, consumer acceptance (or rather, ignorance) of GM foods was fairly high, and Monsanto was ready to gobble up more seed and biotech research companies. And yet this promising scenario was to crumble with remarkable rapidity. By the end of the year, the corporation faced a public relations nightmare: consumers were in revolt, Wall Street had been thoroughly spooked on the future of GM food, an ethical investment fund named Monsanto the 'most unethical investment in the world,' and Shapiro had been attacked by pie-wielding activists, while other more conventional environmentalists condemned him and his corporation from all sides. It was then that crop-pulling in the US really took off.

The opening salvos were fired once again in California, where a crop of GM corn at the University of California in Berkeley was removed from the research agenda by the 'California Croppers', distant cousins of the UK's 'Lincoinshire Loppers'. The next summer, the same university plot was visited again, followed by actions in the Central Valley. A 'Seeds of Resistance' action followed at the University of Maine, after which test sites in Vermont, California, Washington, Minnesota, New York, Hawaii, Oregon, and British Columbia were guerrilla-gardened. Communiques from these events were sent to the GenetiX Alert Press Office in Tennessee, where a press officer sent out press releases and conducted interviews explaining the reasons behind this campaign of non-violent sabotage against biotechnology.

As the campaign gained momentum and sprouted around the US, research losses mounted into the hundreds of thousands, and years of lost work into the dozens. No one was surprised, then, when the feds finally got involved. Last January, the FBI held a symposium in California on ecoterrorism. No, it wasn't an analysis of how Monsanto and the other gene giants are creating a second 'Green Revolution' which, according to the claims of the crop-pulling activists, will cause even more human suffering and ecological destruction than the first one. This conference covered case studies of crop-pulling and surveillance technologies for protecting research. 'Domestic crime targeting biotechnology is the emerging anti-technology crime of the new millennium' concluded the FBI, unsurprisingly. Crop-pulling had arrived.

Some see direct action as a sort of 'indicator species' of the protest ecosystem. In other words, the amount of direct action occurring around a political issue gives a good indication of the level of discontent in society about it. In this case, the large number of GM 'crop decontaminations', with the resulting massive economic and research losses, press coverage, and debate have served to vividly represent public dissent as well as to catalyse it. Today, the American public is well and truly waking up to the GM issue; and much of this awareness is due to the increasing visibility of crop-pulling activists across the USA.

Jonathan Querling is an environmental journalist. For more information on US GM crop-pulling.

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