10:43 AM May 14, 1996

HEALTH: IN A MARKET-DRIVEN WORLD, PROFITS TAKE PRECEDENCE

Penang, May 14 (TWN/Jeremy Seabrook) - The recent revelations about Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or Mad Cow Disease and its transmission to human beings, reflect a fundamental flaw in today's social and economic systems. It calls into question the whole rationale of the market system so espoused and exported by the Western world while also providing for hitherto unpublished insights into food and related industries which have shown that the industrialisation of agriculture was always bound to have some negative consequences.

To apply industrial considerations to the production of food could only occur in the first place, in a culture where the vast majority of people have become separated from growing and producing in a natural way, and are now extremely dependent on oven-ready chips, frozen omelets and pre-cooked gourmet dishes.

Still, it is one thing to be saved from the tiresome chores of hoeing, weeding and harvesting, as well as chopping vegetables, cooking and making meals, and quite another when we entrust these functions to processes over which we have little control and about which we have even less knowledge.

The treatment of nature as if it were, not merely an inexhaustible mine of resources, but also just another industry to be processed, is in itself a recipe for disaster.

The more obvious side effects to health as a consequence of this development are widely known like the damage caused to small farmers in the Third World by excessive dependency upon fertilisers and pesticides, for instance, or the risk to health from agricultural wastes in the water supply and food-chain.

But the possible presence of BSE in British beef calls into question the very nature and dynamic of the market economy itself -- for within it, there is constant pressure for 'improvements', 'productivity' and 'cost-cutting', in which commercial and monetary concerns take precedence over other considerations.

The model of increasing industrial 'efficiency' for the sake of becoming 'profitable', means not merely that the answering of our basic needs, like food, shelter and clothing, must all pass through the market mechanism, but all our social institutions must now be re-modelled in the image of the business enterprise.

The same holds true for health care as it does for education.

This aberrant model has been forcibly exported across the whole globe by the industrial powers, by means of their instruments of coercion, in the international financial institutions and more recently with the creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

What this does is to create growing levels of social dislocation and environmental disturbance.

Yet the market movers say the remedy for all the damaging by-products of this form of development is to intensify the process which caused them in the first place.

As such, biotechnology, transgenic mutations, super-yielding crops are fast becoming the only tried recourse for a world which has depleted its resources, interfered with life-forms, used up its forests and watercourses.

The 'necessity' for continuing this path is often invoked as the only way in which the problems of feeding the world can be achieved. The industrial application of scientific and technology discoveries is, in this version of things, the source of all the amenity, comfort and progress from which humanity has benefited throughout the industrial era.

But what this process amounts to is a recolonisation of the developing world. For what is really happening is that food security is being thrown away in country after country in the Third World, so that they may, in their turn, become dependent upon the deformity of industrialised agribusiness, to feed the profit hunger of the transnationals.

And the blessings of technological advances bring in their wake such spectacular dis-amenities as the contamination of the elements of life, pollution of earth and water, commerciogenic malnutrition, toxins in the food-chain, including BSE and its possible link to Creuetzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

Even when the 'animal feed industry' was being deregulated in the 1980s, many people deplored the feeding of diseased animal remains to herbivores as a means of using the body of the cow as though it were a protein-factory.

Meanwhile, vegetarianism has grown dramatically in Britain, as more and more people shy away from battery hens, veal-crate calves and diseased-sheep-fed cows that have been bred in the country.

It is only to be expected that governments who have looked to the market system as though it were infallible should blame others. Even consumers have been singled out, for 'demanding' cheap food.

But beef is not cheap even when produced with much of the altered, artificial substances.

The same falsehood is repeated when it comes to consumers 'demanding' perfect oranges or apples, so that it is the people, and not the producers, who have reduced the varieties of fruit and limited choice to what is simple and natural.

The driving force behind this is not consumer demand, rather the even stronger demand that profits be made.

That such scandals as BSE can break out in the heartland of the market economy demonstrates to a world which has been the recipient of remorseless pressures to emulate the rich countries, what a fragile, unsustainable and dangerous construct it all is.

It would then follow that the aim of the British scientists and advisers who have been drafted in to contain the 'fall-out' from the BSE scare, is to prevent contamination of the market economy, to forestall a crisis of faith in a whole system.

Over the years, no effort has been spared to protect the market system, including the isolation of those who contest it, self-censoring media, the manipulation of the people by 'opinion-formers'.

Now, will this potentially disastrous affair open up a wider discussion, or will it all be managed into silence, the unrelenting silence that negates everything but the holy, sacred, unappealable truths of a market economy driven by greed?