the reasons to be fearful pens, ordinary people have to have control of where the money goes, and real and accessible information about the results of that research.
Again one of the horrifying aspects of the Porton Down story was the fact that those who 'volunteered' for the experiments had no real information about what was going on.
So what does all of this mean in terms of the debate on genetic modification?
Firstly we need to separate the question of modification in medicine and in framing. In terms of being built.
The Gujarat government wants to raise the height of the dam to 115 metres.
Then in February 1999, the Supreme Court decided the damn could be raised to 85 metres from 80.3 metres. This, activists argue, has sealed the fate of 60 villages which will be submerged by the monsoon rains. 37,690 hectares (93,132 acres) of land in the four states would be submerged, affecting more than 45,000 families and 2,000 poor farmers in the western states.
On July 31 1999 thousands of residents of villages likely to be submerged by the damn demonstrated in slush and rain in the remote village of Parthrad. Marchers shouting "Dams shall not be built, we will not vacate our lands" were joined by Roy other supporters wearing "Free the Narmada" T-shirts". People waving banners lined the roads to welcome Roy as a convoy of buses carrying anti-dam activists passed through villages. "We have come to express support to The your struggle," Roy, dam will on a six-day campaign tour, told produce far less the villagers. electricity and at "The court: realised that con- far greater cost struction of the than planners dam is a must for. the development of claim country's western region," Gujarat state's Irrigation Minister Jainarayan Vyas said following the Supreme Court verdict. Vyas said the state has spent 70.46 billion rupees ($1.66 billion) on the project which will irrigate 1.9 million hectares of land and generate 1,450 megawatts of power. It will also provide drinking water to 8,215 villages, he said.
The minister said 236 km (147 medicine I think that the key question is ensuring that trials take place in an open and extensive manner.
There is no doubt in my mind that if we are able to find cures for diseases through this process then it is one we should support -but that we need to miles) of the main canal and a part of the tyo power stations had already been built.
He said all the tribals displaced by the Narmada project had been rehabilitated at alternate sites with all facilities.
But environmental activist Nandani Oza said 8,000 tribals displaced earlier when the dam was meant to touch a height of 80 metres had not been provided alternative homes.
"Some of them have returned to their native villages which are not yet been submerged," she said.
To Medha Paktar, leader of the Save Narmada movement, the project shows the need to fight for a development policy that is not organised in the interests of the powerful. The movement argues that the dam will produce far less electricity and at far greater cost than the planners claim.
Ms Paktar argues: "Throughout India, even with the regionalisation of politics, there is no true decentralisation so nobody in power Never supports giving power to the people. But there is a silent majority in this country that is living a different kind of life. They realise that more and more resources are being snatched from them and they are beginning to react." Ms Paktar's announcement that she intends to stay in Domkhedi when the waters rise together with other villagers has been controversial including amongst other ecological activists. After all, one quarter of the land that will be submerged was already flooded by the time this protest was announced. Would it not be better they ask of her, and of Roy, to focus on winning better settlements for those whose vilhave the confidence that. this won't lead to side effects that could be as or more dangerous than the original problem.
But most of the controversy OVCH genetic modification has concentrated on the question of farming. Here there are a whole range of questions that need to be addressed. Firstly there is the issue that has had least exposure - what is driving this development in the first place.
Firms like Monsanto have tried to claim that GM foods will cure problems of hunger and famine. In fact the reverse is true.
Already before GM crops, agribusiness has been forcing out small farmers from their traditional farms. Unsustainable lages are next?
There is no doubt that the tactics proposed here are extreme -and pose a serious danger that people who oppose the project may not become involved. But it is clear that they are only one of the methods of struggle employed by the movement.
Equally importantly, those that oppose them most vociferously do so because they question the aim of stopping the project all together; taken in by the notion strong in Indian society ( and elsewhere) that all industrialisation equals progress. But as Roy and others have pointed out the balance sheet of the last 50 years is that projects like this have served to increase the already obscene polarisation in Indian society - to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. In any event there is now a new direction for the campaign as the publicity has generated has begun to exert pressure in Germany. At the heart of the project is the massive Siemens corporation who are demanding DM 240 million in export guarantees to underwrite their involvement. Siemens, who are involved in a joint venture with Bavarian Hypo Vereinsbank and the Indian conglomerate S Kumar made it clear in May that they cannot go ahead without these guarantees and will pull out if they don't get them. Nor is it likely to prove easy to replace them when two German electricity companies pulled out early this year and a US consortium pulled out in the mid-1990's. Maximum international pressure needs to be exerted both on the companies involved and the German (supposedly Red-Green coalition) government to make sure this scandalously project is stopped before more lives are lost and fragile eco-systems destroyed for ever. methods of mono-culture - which rob all the goodness from fertile farm land and leave it barren in a relatively short period of time -have replaced methods of crop rotation practised successfully for centuries.
The destruction of 'forests, the building of massive dams have laid waste vast tracts of land in which communities once lived. The seas have been polluted and overfished through the use of industrial trawlers that decimate fish stocks much more quickly than they can be replaced, under-cutting the livelihoods of many rural communities.
None of this is to argue that life for small farmers, fishers or artisans in these traditional communities is The utopian. This is not our vision of how trials are we want every- being paid for by one to live where life is you and me, as fragile, disease taxpayers, rather rife, poverty endemic. than by the But what capital- corporations ism is doing today is destroying this and replacing it with nothing in terms of these communities. Across the third world these are the people who are forced increasingly into cities where there are no houses for them to live in, no jobs to do, not health or education systems.
This is already the motor force behind the street children in the cities of Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Genetic modification will make this process even more extreme. Power will be concentrated in even fewer hands at the expense of even greater numbers who will be dispossessed and destroyed.
Instead of saving the seed from to buy new seed at inflated prices - prices that they will not be able to afford. That is why there is so much opposition to genetically modified crops from small farmers across the third world.
That is why all socialists should stand with them in opposing these developments.
There are of course other issues too, issues that have had rather more airing in the media here. It is true that once genetically modified crops are grown outside a laboratory environment it is extremely likely that this will cause cross-contamination of other plants including of organic crops.
The danger here is that this cross-contamination will make it impossible to really tell what the effects of genetic modification are, as there will not be any comparators outside a laboratory situation.
But the government tells us that these trials are necessary if we are not test out the implications of this technology, so that must be right mustn't it? hey never point out that would be perfectly possible - if costly - to construct huge laboratories in which the tests could take place which mirrored all the conditions of the natural environment, but didn't pose the same risks.
But that would undercut the profits of giants like Monsanto if they had to pay for it - and that's another point. The powers that be also keep rather quiet about the fact that the trials are being paid for by you and me, as taxpayers, rather than by the corporations who will benefit from their outcome. All in all then, while I have some reluctance to support the tactics of those who trample GM fields (because at first glance their attitude seems anti-scientific) in the context of the world we live in GM foods will not bring positive benefits to anyone other than the multinationals.
That's probably another good reason for changing the world.