Geneticists Who "Play at Being God"

that no such moratorium existed. The WTO judges argued the EU was "guilty" of not following EU rules, causing "undue delay" in following WTO obligations.2

The secretive WTO tribunal also ruled, according to the leaked document, that formal EU government approval to plant specific GMO plants had also been unduly delayed in the cases of 24 out of 27 specific GMO products presented to the European Commission in Brussels.

The WTO tribunal recommended that the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), the world trade policeman, call on the EU to bring its practices "into conformity with its obligations under the (WTO's) SPS Agreement." That was the notorious Sanitary and Phytosanitary escape clause of the agribusiness industry allowing it to use WTO trade supremacy to trample national rights to care for the health and safety of their citizens. Failure to comply with WTO demands could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual fines to the European Union.3

The EU Commission itself, the powerful, largely unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels which controls the daily lives of some 470 million EU citizens in 25 member countries, was split over GMO. A Danish Agriculture Commissioner was strongly pro-GMO. The EU Environment Minister, from Greece which had a law strictly banning GMO, was strongly anti-GMO. Farmers across the EU were organizing spontaneous "GMO-free" zones and putting pressure on their politicians not to bow to WTO demands. Opinion surveys showed repeatedly than European citizens, when asked, expressed a strong negative view on GMO, often by margins of 60% or more.4

Geneticists Who "Play at Being God" On April 14, 2006, at his Good Friday meditations, the highest authority of the Roman Catholic Church, German-born Pope Benedict XVI made a clear and bold declaration. The Pontiff condemned genetic scientists "who play at being God."

Addressing the recent scientific developments in the field of genetic engineering, the Pope sternly warned against their attempts

to "modify the very grammar of life as planned and willed by God:' He attacked the geneticists' "insane, risky and dangerous ventures which attempt to take God's place without being God." With a blistering condemnation of modern social "satanic" mores, which he said were in danger of destroying humanity, Benedict XVI then spoke of a modern "anti-Genesis:' a "diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family."

It was the strongest and most explicit condemnation yet by the Church of the practice of genetic engineering of life forms, whether plant or animal. It reinforced earlier efforts by elements of that same Church over a period of decades to resist the growing onslaughts on human reproduction financed and promoted by the circles in and around the Rockefeller Foundation (from John D. Ill's Population Council, to Henry Kissinger's NSSM 200, to the secret human vaccination with specially-treated Tetanus injections). With the exception of a few short media quotes, the significance of the Papal comments was buried by the major international media.5

At the point of writing this book, it was not clear whether or not the GMO juggernaut would be stopped globally. A new conservative Chancellor in Germany, Angela Merkel, was intent on warming chilled relations with George W. Bush's Washington. In February 2007, her Cabinet met to discuss reversing the Government's cautious GMO policies and promoting GMO as the "technology of the future:' The Conservative Agriculture Minister, Horst Seehofer, advocated a decisive weakening of the previous government's Law on Gene Plants. The government of Gerhard Schroeder had approved a law stating the provision that a farmer or concern which planted GMO seeds was liable for damages to the GMO-free areas were the GMO seeds to contaminate a neighboring land. That provision, opposite to the liability law regarding GMO in the USA and Canada, had acted as a major barrier preventing the widespread proliferation of GMO in Germany and most of the European Union.6 Yet groups of German farmers in the thousands were rapidly organizing opposition. Similar resistance was growing in Poland, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, the UK, France and across the EU.

What few realized was how very vulnerable the entire GMO mafia was to criticism.New forms of media and private communication outside the mainstream were emerging into cyberspace to communicate the experiences of farmers like Glockner in Germany, Schmeiser in Canada, or scientists like Arpad Puzstai in Scotland, who courageously risked everything to tell the world of the risks associated with the GMO project.

Alone, the potential for exercising arbitrary political and human power in the manner in which the US and UK governments had encouraged the patenting and spread of genetically engineered plants, was grounds for organizing a global ban or moratorium on GMO plants and a permanent prohibition of any patent on living plants or animals. The fact that the grandiose claims for GMO in terms of higher yields and lower herbicide use were false to·boot, added to the growing opposition to GMO.

Population reduction and genetically engineered crops were part of the same broad strategy: drastic targeted reduction of the world's population-genocide-the systematic elimination of entire population groups was the result of a wilful policy, promulgated under the name of "solving the world hunger problem."

Recalling the earlier words of Henry Kissinger is telling: "Control the oil, you control a land; control the food, you control the people .... " By 2006, Washington's Bush Administration seemed well on the way to securing global control of both oil and food. What was not yet clear was whether hundreds of millions of normal, healthloving citizens would decide the issues at stake were too important to leave to such people.

F. William Engdahl July 2007

Notes

1. World Trade Organization, Various EC Member State Safeguard Measures Prohibiting the Import and/or Marketing of Specific Biotech Products (hereafter the "Member State Safeguard Measures"), WTIDS291-3/R, p. 343, http://www.wto.orgl english/tratop_e/dispu_e/291r_4_e.pdf. 2. F. William Engdahl, "WTO, GMO and Total Spectrum Dominance: WTO Rules Put Free-Trade of Agribusiness Above National Health Concerns", Global Research, 29 March 2006, http://www.globalresearch.ca. 3. European Commission, Directorate-General for Trade, Brussels, General Overview of Active WTO Dispute Settlement Cases Involving the EC as Complainant or Defendamt and of Active Cases Under the Trade Barriers Regulation, 23 February 2007. 4. Friends of the Earth of Europe, What Europeans Think about GMOs, http://www.foeeurope.orglGMOs/WhaCEuropeans.htm. 5. Ruth Gledhill, "Pope Condemns Geneticists 'Who Play at Being God", The Times, 14 April 2006. 6. BUND, Deutschnald, Drittes Gesetz zur Anderung des Gentechnikgesetzes, http://www.bund.net.