In a discussion that took place in Turin at the great Terra Madre 2006 meeting, an engineer from Zaragoza, Jorge Hernandez, owner of a traditional hacienda, said that the 100 global enterprises that trade food in the world promised that:

1.hunger shall be eradicated
2.environment shall be improved
3.nature’s errors (!) will be corrected 

Their propaganda, says Hernandez, set aside social critique and failed in all three abovementioned points. The result of standardizations of plants and animals started over by the IMF in the 1970s were a continuous pauperization of almost a third of the world’s population, a decrease in the number of traditional farmers, and it gave absolute power to international trade, deteriorating people’s diets. Activist Vandana Shiva once said that the extreme image of today’s global development is composed by the obese American child and, on the other side, the skeleton-like body of the African.

Biotechnology offered big financial groups a path towards new sources of quick income, and the actual model of scientific domination augmented the cleavage between center and periphery, north and south, on a global scale.

Is biotech evil or just wrong?