GM seed firms invest heavily in research and development, and naturally, they want to recoup their investment. But in their rush to secure patents and reap profits, critics contend, big biotech firms are deliberately over-promoting the benefits of GM technology and underestimating possible health, socioeconomic, and environmental hazards.

Detractors say these companies are also concentrating their efforts in high-volume crops, such as soybeans, corn, and cotton, and not in crops that might help feed the billions of people who live in poor countries. A World Bank report in 1997 found only four "coherent, coordinated" GM research programs on developing-world crops at the time.

This "greed-not-need" ethic, GM opponents assert, may soon operate in an Orwellian agricultural climate, in which the power to produce and distribute food is concentrated in the hands of a few gigantic biotech firms. In 1998, the top ten seed companies controlled an estimated 30 to 40 percent of worldwide seed sales, which reach $45 billion a year.

"The dramatic increase in the development, marketing, and sale of genetically modified seed and crops has far more to do with inflating corporate profits than with the sustainability of America's family farmers or the health of its consumers."

--Howard Vail, president of Farm For Profit Research & Development, a sustainable agriculture organization based in Embarrass, MN [25]

"Genetically engineered (GE) rice -- such as the now-famous vitamin A rice or 'golden rice' -- is being heavily promoted as a solution to hunger and malnutrition. Yet these promotional campaigns are clouding the real issues of poverty and control over resources, and serving to fast-track acceptance of genetically engineered crops in developing countries."

--Joint statement to the press on 6/2/00 by three farmer organizations in Southeast Asia: BIOTHAI (Thai Network on Biodiversity and Community Rights), KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines), and MASIPAG (Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development, Philippines) [26]

"The feeding-the-world argument is a very carefully engineered P.R. exercise to create some moral legitimacy for this technology."

--Brian Halweil, analyst at the Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C. [27]

References:
25: From a 11/13/98 press release, www.farmforprofit.com/PRels.html.
26: Quoted in "The False Promise of Genetically Engineered Rice," www.non-gmos.com/Zeitung/2000/001015a.html.
27: Quoted in "Critics of Biotechnology Are Called Imperialists," by Andrew Pollack, New York Times, 2/4/01.

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