At the same time that the world’s biotech scientists and regulators were deep in Monday’s ABIC 2007 conference in Calgary, 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 cooperation that would make a real difference to the world’s hungry and poor.
Not a single journalist showed up.
“How do we get attention?” asked Ray Mowling, executive director for the Council of Biotechnology Information.
Time and again through the first two days of the conference, biotech supporters have said they find their access to the public is blocked, while Green Peace activists and alarmists seem to get headlines.
One world, one message
Yet Clive James, chair of the International Association for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, a non-profit group seeking to ensure the developing world gets access to the best possible science, 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 produce 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 says have lost all sense of reality.
“It requires work and budgets,” Moore said. Moore recommends 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, Moore said. The team should write opinion pieces and op-eds too. “Push back,” Moore said.
Lead by example
Agriculture holds the keys to global health. To help the public see that, said John Oliver of Maple Leaf Bio Concepts, 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 sup-port initiatives to help their employees improve their health.
Believe in farmers
Biotechnology may start in a lab, but the real power is with the farmers who buy the seed.
India tried to ban Bt cotton, Patrick Moore pointed out. The government backed down, however, when Indian farmers protested.
In California, meanwhile, anti-biotech lobbyists launched county plebiscites calling for the banning of 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.
Across the world, said Dr. C. S. Prakash, 10 million farmers plant biotech crops, including nine million farmers in developing countries. They buy those seeds, he said, because of selfinterest, and a way to improve their lot in life.
Make a contribution
“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, and then quote John Kenneth Galbraith. “If you don’t know you have a problem,” he said. “then you have a real problem.”