January 31, 2012 - It
took seven years, teams of young campaigners
and hordes of devoted supporters, but September
2011 the Chinese government finally said
it was suspending the commercialisation
of genetically-engineered (GE) rice.
See the full story in
Greenpeace East Asia's online magazine.
The origins of rice
cultivation can be traced to the valleys
of China's Yangtze River, with some estimates
putting it at over 7,000 years ago. In that
time, rice has become an integral part of
Chinese life and culture. It dictates the
lives of millions of farmers in the Chinese
countryside, feeds over a billion Chinese
citizens each year and is synonymous with
Chinese cuisine and culture. And Yunnan,
in southwestern China is where much of this
rice originates from.
Back in 2004, the GE
rice campaign was one of the first campaigns
for our new team in mainland China. Campaign
Director of Greenpeace East Asia, Sze Pang
Cheung, remembers those early days with
a smile. "We launched the campaign
with a five-day bus tour of Guangzhou,"
he says. "Actually it was more like
a van than a bus, and it wasn't even ours.
We borrowed it from another environmental
NGO.”
In October 2004, Sze
Pang Cheung and his team headed to Yunnan
where many of the locals employ traditional
sustainable farming methods. They provided
cameras so that the locals could record
their rice lives including "duck-rice"
farming where ducks paddle about the flooded
rice paddies, eating up pests and fertilizing
fields with their manure. Duck-rice farming
has been around for 2,000 years.
The tour was such a
success that the cameras were lent out for
an extended period of a year and a beautiful
book was made to record the images. But
just as they were about to head south, the
team got some bad news; Chinese scientists
had applied to commercialise four varieties
of Chinese GE rice. While the scientists'
move didn't mean that GE rice would be commercialized
any time soon, it was a major step towards
commercialszation.
Rice dictates the lives
of millions of farmers in the Chinese countryside,
feeds over a billion Chinese citizens each
year and is synonymous with Chinese cuisine
and culture. And Yunnan, in southwestern
China is where much of this rice originates
from. There was no doubt about it - this
was a critical fight. So when the team got
back from the duck-rice fields, they devoted
themselves to the campaign. First they unraveled
the complex web of players involved in the
push for commercialization.
"For a scientist
to have a high level of credibility they
need to be separated from approval bodies
and industry. But in China, GE scientists
are such a close knit gang that the people
sitting on approval boards for research
money, biosafety boards that approve product
safety, the scientists at public research
institutes, and those at biotech companies
who plan to produce and profit from GE rice
are either one and the same, or closely
connected," explains Sze Pang Cheung.
We leaked their findings
to the press. The web of deceit was published
in the Southern Weekend, a Guangdong-based
newspaper. "After that story came out
the GE rice scientists and experts were
inundated with so many calls they appear
to have shut their phones down for three
months," says Sze Pang Cheung.
Swiss-born Isabelle
Meister was a veteran campaigner by the
time she joined the China team in 2005.
"It's easier to attack a corporation
for their dirty methods or products,"
she muses. "But what do you do when
the bad guys are scientists in publicly-funded
institutes or sitting on a government board?
Scientists should be neutral. They shouldn't
be the ones you want to attack. So this
was a big shock to me."
Isabelle decided to
use a campaign method with Chinese characteristics:
China is a country where money talks, patriotism
is prevalent and people take their food
seriously. So the campaign focused on GE
rice was a threat to food sovereignty. Multi-national
companies – not Chinese farmers – stand
to profit from the commercialization of
GE rice from investments in technology and
patents.
By the end of 2009 it
looked all but inevitable that rice produced
in China would be predominantly genetically
engineered. Long after the fact, the Chinese
government announced that a secret multi-ministerial
meeting had passed two GE rice lines – even
though they had not received biosafety certificates
at the time.
Chinese politicians
began raising doubts over genetic engineering,
followed by a string of Chinese celebrities
including Mao Zedong's daughter, and the
father of China's hybrid rice, Yuan Longping.
Several Chinese scholars signed a petition
urging caution on GE rice and submitted
it to the Parliament.
"The pressure on
the Ministry of Agriculture was so high
it was actually forced to announce that
no approval of GE rice had been given and
that GE rice remains illegal," says
Isabelle.
The time was ripe for
us to begin a large-scale anti-GE rice campaign.
The team exposed American retail giant Walmart
for selling GE rice in China and filed a
legal case against it. The team distributed
a GE shopper's guide to half a million Chinese
consumers through mobile and Internet services.
Chinese consumers joined the campaign, ringing
up companies and demanding they go non-GE.
Greenpeace campaigner
Lorena Luo will never forget one reader
who was so dedicated that she voluntarily
checked all her favorite food brands at
her local supermarket against our shopper's
guide . The woman then called red listed
brands and told them that as a consumer
she would like them to become non-GE. She
showed a kind of persistence that would
match any of our in-house campaigners.
GE rice was big news:
TV, magazines, newspapers and online media
joined the debate. Isabelle urged her team
to get companies to make non-GE pledges.
Two huge corporations, Cofco and Yihai Kerry
readily obliged and a string of supermarkets
also pledged not to use GE ingredients in
their own brands and with their fresh unpacked
fruits, vegetables and grains.
And then, in September
2011, came the big news we had all been
waiting for. China's major financial weekly,
the Economic Observer quoted an information
source close to the Ministry of Agriculture
saying that China had suspended the commercialisation
of GE rice.
While the fight is not
yet over, we still need the Chinese government
to reassess its GE investments and focus
on sustainable agriculture, there is no
doubt that our seven-year GE rice campaign
has been a success.
Thanks to our members,
activists, mothers, supportive scientists,
volunteers and concerned citizens, we took
on Goliath and won!
