Calgary —At the same time that the world’s biotech scientists and regulators were deep in the 2007 Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference (ABIC 2007) conference here, Canada’s media had been been invited to a press conference in the same building with Dr. Florence Wambugu, one of the world’s leading scientists helping Africa feed itself.
The press conference was to announce how a Canadian company, Performance Plants, was helping Wambugu’s team access new drought genetics in a sign of international co-operation that would make a real difference to the world’s hungry and poor.
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Not a single journalist showed up.
“How do we get attention?” asked Ray Mowling, executive director for the Council of Biotechnology Information and a former president of Monsanto Canada.
Through the first two days of the conference, biotech supporters have said they find their access to the public is blocked, while Greenpeace-style activists and alarmists seem to get headlines.
Yet Clive James, chair of the International Association for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, a non-profit group, noted that his group held a world press conference in January attended by 75 journalists from prestigious publications including The Economist and the Washington Post. That one conference produced over 1,125 articles that were read by a calculated 550 million people, and 99 per cent of the articles were positive.
The key, said James, was to develop an international perspective, so there is one central biotechnology message around the world. Influencing global journalists, James said, will influence the regional media who read them.
“Now we have a tower of Babel,” James said. “We need to share knowledge.”
Think globally, write locally
For 15 years, Patrick Moore helped head up Greenpeace, and his talent was for getting the kind of media wins that anti-biotech protestors are getting today. Now chief scientist for Greenspirit Strategies, Moore counsels industry groups on how they can fight back against activists that he said have lost all sense of reality.
“It requires work and budgets,” Moore said. He recommended setting up networks of experts and dedicated volunteers. Each time a slanted biotech article appears, a letter to the editor should be in the paper the next day. The team should write opinion pieces and op-eds too. “Push back,” he said.
John Oliver of Maple Leaf Bio Concepts said agriculture needs to show more leadership in promoting health lifestyles in their own communities.
With North American confronting an obesity epidemic, ag companies should take the lead in fostering healthy lifestyles and developing education programs and support initiatives to help their employees improve their health.
Farmers who buy the seed produced from biotech also wield power, Moore noted. India tried to ban Bt cotton, he said, but the government backed down when Indian farmers protested.
In California, meanwhile, anti-biotech lobbyists launched county plebiscites calling for a ban on biotech crops. Once the activists moved out of the cities, however, they met a wall of organized farmers with a sophisticated political network.
The anti-biotech movement lost three votes in a row and abandoned the tactic, Moore said.
“The way to talk about biotechnology is in terms of the contribution it can make,” Clive James said. Biotechnology isn’t a panacea. It won’t provide every answer, but coupled with the best conventional breeding, it will contribute to producing solutions.
By focusing on contributions, James added, supporters can attack an even more serious problem. The public doesn’t know how serious the world’s problems are, James said, then quoted John Kenneth Galbraith.
“If you don’t know you have a problem,” he said. “then you have a real problem.”
Farm Business Communications is reporting from the Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference Sept. 23-26 in Calgary. Click here for full coverage of the week’s speakers and events, courtesy of Country Guide.
