The economy

• Modern biotechnology is exceedingly capital-intensive, especially in terms of financial capital. The biotechnology industry raises some $4 billion a year in public equity, most of which is spent on research and development (R&D), even when that results in companies taking financial losses.

Many industrialized countries (United States, Western Europe, Japan) promote biotechnology as an industrial policy, in order to spur economic growth through achieving a national competitive advantage. The U.S. government's direct funding of biotechnology R&D has approximated the public equity raised--about $4 billion. Indirect forms of industrial policy include tax and trade policies, and intellectual property rights (IPRs). International agreements on IPRs completed in the last few years extend patent rights to plant varieties and broaden the protection of plant breeders' rights to include derived varieties, at the expense of traditional farmers' rights (GATT 1994 and UPOV 1991).

Under such economic conditions, the biotechnology companies that will survive are those that consolidate. This has been precisely the trend since 1991, as large pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies have purchased smaller, dedicated biotechnology companies, and fewer companies are opening up stock for public sale. Consolidation strategies include acquisition by transnational corporations (TNCs), "vertical integration," and consortium formation.

There are other strategies that may help biotechnology companies survive: flexible investment schemes; cultivation of relations with governmental and academic institutions; mutually profitable exclusive licensing between companies working on complementary technologies.

Small, dedicated medical biotechnology companies are more likely to remain independent of TNCs, especially because of their ability to use "bio-prospecting" and IPR protection to speed up the process of screening biological resources for medically useful compounds and then laying claim to them. Agricultural biotechnology, which long has run in second place to medical biotechnology, is catching up quickly, largely because of recent government approval of its products, and because of its global market.

• The "winners" will be the companies that can monopolize the industry.

• At the scale of the global economy, highly industrialized countries, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, will be the winners in the biotechnology race.

Agricultural biotechnology will mainly aggravate current trends in the polarization of wealth and unequal access to food. Their capability to synthesize high-value agricultural products in the laboratory may lead to irreversible substitution for imports from "resource-providing" Third World countries. In addition, crop plants are being engineered for viability in a variety of climates and soil conditions, undermining the once fundamental relationship of agriculture to the land. Industrialized agriculture in general is divorced from labor because of its capital-intensiveness. Biotechnology separates agriculture from the land, as well, allowing those who control the capital and the technologies unprecedented flexibility in deciding which agricultural products to cultivate, when, how, and with what inputs.

Patents and extended plant breeders' rights will protect genetically engineered crop plants. As these plants and their seeds become more prevalent, they will be available only to those who can afford to pay licensing fees and to buy new seed continually. Those who are able to do so are likely to promote their cultivation and sale further, in order to make their investment back. The effect will be the same as that of the substitution of 'Green Revolution" high-yield varieties for traditional crops. Furthermore, much of the yield will end up on the export market, not in the mouths of poor farmers.

One "side-effect" of undermining Third World agriculture is social upheaval, as communities based on traditional agriculture lose their reason for existence, and their members are drawn elsewhere in search of a means of survival, increasingly to urban slums.

• The net result at an international level will be that countries without biotechnology or the means to develop it are going to be at a competitive disadvantage. Even when and if they acquire these tools, the poorest people in these countries are going to be dispossessed entirely. They will be "losers" in the swiftly evolving world of biotechnology.

The advance of medical biotechnology promises to be a scramble for genetic resources and captive markets. "Bio-piracy," known in the industry as "bio-prospecting," uses national and international IPR laws to lay claim to plants, animals, and their derivatives. It exploits, in particular, the detailed knowledge of the medicinal properties of local species possessed by traditional societies in biologically rich and diverse countries. Furthermore, medical biotechnology can combine GATT 1994 stipulations against "non-tariff barriers" to trade with well subsidized, capital-intensive production to seize the markets of countries where pharmaceutical production and distribution are nationalized.

Since the fall of communist régimes of the Soviet bloc, Eastern European and Southern Hemispheric countries have been competing for the assistance of global capital, in order to maintain a semblance of possessing national economies. Eastern Europe is more attractive to investors because it has the industrial infrastructure, an educated work force, and weak environmental regulation. The South is under increasing pressure to offer up its genetic resources in exchange for the end product--biotechnology. In this context, it should not be surprising that the Balkans have become a center of R&D and testing of plant biotechnology.

• Small farmers and factory workers in rich, industrialized countries will also be losers in the biotechnology race.

For example, Amgen, Inc., the biggest and most successful dedicated biotechnology company in the world, had a worldwide staff of 4,498 in 1996. In contrast, the Boeing Company, the world's largest manufacturer of aircraft, still employs about 120,000 people--even after laying off nearly half its work force in 1995. As industrial jobs are strategically relocated to low-wage countries, a smaller, technologically skilled "core" work force will develop, surrounded by a "contingent" work force providing cheap services. The growth of the biotechnology industry contributes to this process.

• As the world's work force is restructured to meet the exigencies of the capital-intensive, technology-driven global economy, those who have long been the poorest and most oppressed--women, ethnic minorities, and indigenous peoples--will lose more.

Health and environment

• In the short term, there will almost certainly be some winners in the area of health, as a result of modern biotechnology. Daily, researchers and "biotechnicians" make advances in treating chronic and acute diseases, including AIDS and cancer, as well as congenital dispositions. They are developing new vaccines and experimenting with direct "gene therapy."

Given the urgency inherent in modern medicine, biotechnology holds the promise of accelerated product development, through efficient, reductionistic identification of disease-causing agents.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on genetically engineered drugs that have failed. At least one of these drugs proved to have lethal side-effects. Gene therapy is still largely speculative, and many of its experiments have failed. Some of the failures stem from lack of accounting for complex interactions among genes.

Public and private money and material are diverted to medical biotechnology at the expense of alternative therapies, preventive and holistic medicine.

Doctors are known to promote new medicines and test them on patients, because of the well established connection between the pharmaceutical industry and modern medicine. There is reason to believe that this trend will continue or grow with biotechnology, especially in light of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that patients have no "property rights" to their bodily tissues.

• To the extent that the advancement of medical biotechnology reduces the number of our medical options, we all lose.

Genetically engineered biochemicals have been released into the environment, and will continue to be released for the foreseeable future. They include "enhancement" chemicals, "bio-pesticides," and nutritional supplements. The effect on human health of some of them is unknown--though potentially harmful--while others have proved lethal.

• Even if all the hypothetical direct risks to human health prove to be unfounded--and the real ones are found trivial--there will remain the toll on health taken by economic and social disintegration following from the economic impact of biotechnology.

• Genetically engineered organisms pose the greatest threat to ecosystems, including agricultural ecosystems, since they can become dynamic living parts of them.

Crop plants are being genetically engineered to express a number of traits, including herbicide resistance, ecological viability, bio-pesticides, and virus resistance. These traits or the genes that express them could have profound ecological consequences, ranging from new pesticide tolerances to the creation of noxious weeds. There is great concern that genetically engineered high-yield plant varieties, like their Green Revolution predecessors, requiring heavy inputs, will result in soil contamination and water depletion. Some fear that traditional cultivated varieties will displaced or destroyed by their introduction.

Genetically engineered microorganisms are being developed for increased frost resistance in plants, enhanced nitrogen fixation, and bio-remediation. They have proven to be either ineffective or to have complex and unpredictable effects, some of them deleterious.

Higher animals are also being engineered for various purposes. The genetic engineering of fish, in particular, raises serious ecological issues, mainly because of their capability of traveling far and invading new ecosystems.

Systems of knowledge

• International IPR laws do not respect the innovations and in ingenuity of indigenous peoples and local communities. Biotechnology companies exploit this unequal treatment to gain the traditional material resources and knowledge they require, even if it means the destruction of biological and cultural diversity.

Science, too, will suffer--ecology and economics, in particular. Research will be distorted by preferential funding. As the biotechnology industry forges alliances with universities, academic researchers are withholding their findings from scientific publications and conferences. We should expect a larger portion of academic budgets will be diverted to R&D. We will probably also see more industry influence in the curricula of primary and secondary schools.

Technological alternatives, especially in the fields of medicine and agriculture will be overlooked as the biotechnology industry prevails.

Politics

The development of the biotechnology industry is an integral part of the rise of neo-liberal global economy. As the global economy's technological, legal, and institutional armature grows, commensurate oversight and social governance are being weakened. There is a steady erosion of public knowledge of the issues, public participation in making decisions, and public accountability among the agents of industries, governments, and intergovernmental organizations.

The introduction of agricultural biotechnology to poor, less industrialized nations is likely lead to social disintegration and may foment the sort of internecine struggles witnessed in India since the Green Revolution.

As biotechnology separates agriculture from both labor and land, the "collective bargaining" power of Third World countries will be diminished. Furthermore, global capital will almost certainly play Eastern Europe against the Third World Southern Hemisphere--unless concerted effort is made to build countervailing political relations.

• Thus biotechnology is wrapped up in our loss of meaningful political life.