Prince Charles to Tony Blair: Get Lost

Even in the darkest days of Princess Di mania, when his name was mud among the masses, I had high hopes for Prince Charles as a radical thorn in the side of business-as-usual. He’s always been conspicuous for sensible environmental positions athwart conventional opinion--on the Amazon rainforest, land use and organic agriculture. Now he’s justifying my expectations, launching princely broadsides against some of capital’s mightiest corporate powers, specifically Monsanto and the genetic-industrial complex.

Last month, Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered the prince to shut down his royal Web site (www.princeofwales.gov.uk), which features vigorous denunciations by the heir apparent of GM--genetically modified crops. (In the U.S., it’s GE--genetically engineered crops.) The prince refused point blank the prime minister’s command.

Genetic material, the prince thunders in one posting, “does not stay where it is put. Pollen is spread by the wind and by insects. GM crops can contaminate conventional and organic crops growing nearby.” Such crops eventually mean “sterile fields offering little or no food or shelter to wild life.”

The prince adds, “I wonder about the claims that some GM crops are essential to feed the world’s growing populations. . . . [H]ow will the companies who own this technology make a sufficient profit from selling their products to the world’s poorest people? Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate instead on the sustainable techniques which can double or treble the yields from traditional farming systems?”

It may seem ironic that the British heir apparent should be adopting a principled, enlightened position in marked contrast to Blair and the social democrats. But their roles are in character. Blair’s tradition of social democracy has a frenzied enthusiasm for supposed technological progress. It was Harold Wilson, Labor Party leader in the ‘60s, who used to hymn “the white heat of technology.” The tradition of rambling and rural hiking that used to mark British radicals has long since gone. Far dearer to Blair’s heart are big corporations--most notably Monsanto--that are pushing patents for genetically modified crops into Europe. Blair ordered the prince to shut down his Web site, calling it political meddling. GM is a hot issue in the UK.

The stakes are high for Monsanto. Consumers Union estimates that Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone, rBGH, could earn the company $500 million a year in the U.S. and another $1 billion a year internationally. The haul from Monsanto’s Round-Up Ready soybeans, potatoes and corn and its terminator seeds could be tens of billions more.

Faced with the almost certain prospect that the European Union would ban the import of Monsanto genetically modified corn in 1998, the company unleashed an unprecedented lobbying effort, flying a group of critical journalists to the U.S. to visit its corporate headquarters and labs with a side trip to the White House. Bill Clinton and Al Gore got into the act, engaging in some last-minute arm-twisting of the Irish and French prime ministers. France and Ireland caved in to the pressure by last July. This spring, Monsanto’s GM corn will be planted in Europe.

In Britain, the Labor government, secure in its majority, is nonetheless embarrassed by blunders on the GM issue, including that Lord Sainsbury, Labor’s science minister, who is deeply involved in GM decision-making, had financial and familial ties in GM companies.

Prince Charles commands considerable public support from Britons deeply suspicious of scientific manipulation of their food. The ‘60s live on, in the most surprising ways. A decent slice of Prince Charles’s world view--cosmic holism, organic communitarianism--mirrors that of an American hippie in the late ‘60s. After all, organic agriculture in America owes much to the hippies, as does Humboldt Gold, an example of biological manipulation of the most uplifting sort.