NEW DELHI: Governments concerned about nuclear proliferation should be more worried by the greater potential for mischief that biotechnology holds in military and criminal minds, say members of an international panel of scientists involved in shaping the Biosafety Protocol.

In India for a strategy session ahead of the Second World Social Forum in Porte Alegre, Brazil next week, which will discuss alternatives to globalisation, the experts said biotechnology weapon programmes now being developed secretly by several governments are insidious. They are more difficult to detect than programmes for developing nuclear weapons, they added.

“Biotechnology weapons come out of test tubes rather than the large conspicuous facilities that are needed for developing and delivering nuclear weapons,” Christine von Wiezsacker, vice president of Ecoropa, the Green Movement of Europe said.

And in the same way that nuclear technology was promoted as having the potential to solve supposed shortages of energy resources, biotechnology is now being touted by its proponents as the answer to mythical food shortages, added Sue Edwards, biology professor at the Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

A classic example is “terminator” technology, which renders seeds infertile in subsequent generations so that farmers are forced to return to the transnational firms to buy seeds rather than use what they have stored, as in traditional farming

Worst of all is the refusal of governments that are backed by the same TNCs to accept the international regulation of little-understood areas of biotechnology, notably genetic engineering, despite its potential for mass destruction, intended or otherwise, said Prof. Jean Grossholtz, feminist and global campaigner for cultural and biological diversity.

Grossholtz , who teaches at the Holyoke College in Massachusetts in the United States, said the US government was taking advantage of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the anthrax scare, to restrict the right of citizens to information about its biological defence programme.

She said that the US government was clearly more interested in defending the interests of TNCs than in protecting citizens from biological warfare, and was also moving away from commitments under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) not to develop or stockpile biological weapons.

In fact, the United States has been accused of sabotaging the fifth convention of the BTWC at Geneva in December, where negotiations were held on for mandatory verification mechanisms for the international inspection of suspected biological weapons research and production facilities.

Wiezsacker, Edwards and Grossholtz are part of Diverse Women for Diversity, a movement begun with the avowed aim of creating diverse solutions to economic globalisation at the local level and building a coalition of women for a common defence against the process at a global level.

They are being hosted in India by Vandana Shiva, a founder of the movement and director of the New Delhi-based, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which works on protecting sustainable, organic farming.

A self-declared nuclear-weapons state, India has been vigorously pursuing genetic engineering as a means to food security. This is in spite of a massive 50-million tonne grain surplus amidst widespread reports of starvation deaths and chronic malnutrition among more than half of its billion plus population.

Thanks to a powerful political and bureaucratic elite that dictates policy in India, the country has a chain of state-run laboratories and facilities th that have acknowledged capabilities in frontline areas like space, nuclear and missile technology as well as biotechnology.

In the midst of the global anthrax scare last year, the Indian government’s biotechnology laboratories showed off their prowess by announcing the development of a superior recombinant vaccine against the farmyard germ that has earned notoriety as a biological warfare agent.

The experts said that India, which is now firmly committed to globalization after renouncing half-a-century of independent development, presented the classic example of how food shortages were caused by poor distribution mechanisms and government policies rather than low agricultural output.

India officially permitted the sale of genetically engineered cotton seeds, although Shiva and other activists have campaigned against it for years. They have a petition pending in the Supreme Court seeking to restrain the government from letting in the technology without public debate.

Genetically engineered cotton has been freely available in the Indian seed market for at least three years now. Shiva and other activists believe that this is the result of clandestine testing carried out by the translation firm that developed the seed by splicing it with toxic genes from bacteria for pest resistance.—Dawn/InterPress Service.