This week the Vatican has endorsed genetically modified crops as a solution to end global hunger. Since the Vatican has consistently been opposed to any technology (including condoms) that has “scientists meddling with God’s creation” this is a rather dramatic change in their stance.

According to New Scientist:

GM crops were heartily endorsed at a week-long seminar held by the academy in mid-May. Participants agreed that the crops offer food safety and security, better health and environmental sustainability. That verdict is not shared by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, a global UN-backed think tank that last year rejected GM as a solution to hunger.

Some say the seminar excluded dissenters within the church who fear that GM technology allows multinationals to control agriculture at the expense of the poor. But participants deny bias: they also concluded that regulations are too strict, so only big companies can afford to get GM crops approved, whereas non-profit organisations that want to help the poor cannot.

The Catholic News Service states that the aim of the Pontifical Academy of Science week-long seminar was to gather “an objective group of experts” in a search for “scientific clarity” on the subject. However, as SpinWatch has shown, all forty of the seminar’s participants are GM supporters and many are industry insiders.

One of the participants, Eric Sachs, is a Monsanto employee. Another, Robert Paarlberg, is an advisor to Monsanto’s CEO, and Peter Raven and Roger Beachy head up institutions that have benefited from Monsanto’s corporate largesse to the tune of many millions of dollars. Yet another speaker, C.S. Prakash, runs the AgBioWorld campaign, which has been used as a vehicle by Monsanto and its PR people for propaganda attacks on the company’s critics.

Another speaker, Henry I. Miller, is from the right-wing Hoover Institution and is a scholar at the Monsanto-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is also a member of the scientific-advisory board for the climate change-denying George C. Marshall Institute and has previously stated that “Al Gore is a sick man … [who] appears to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder” because of his bold climate change advocacy. A host of others are advisers for the anti-regulation institutions WTO, IMF or USAID.

A look at a few of the abstracts from the talks should emphasize the direction of this “objective” seminar:

Financial Support of Anti-GMO Lobby Groups
Andrew Apel

Financial support for anti-GMO lobby groups is substantial, and severely distorts public discourse over a topic which would otherwise be uncontroversial. Governments, primarily in Europe, support the lobby groups in an effort to appear ‘green’ to their constituencies.

Risks for Consumer Health
Bruce M. Chassy

Governments around the globe have passed regulations that require crops produced using modern biotechnology to be subjected to rigorous, time-consuming, and expensive pre-market safety reviews. These reviews can consume 5-10 years and have a direct cost of 10s of millions of $US; the indirect cost of lost benefits can be staggering.

Trading in Transgenic Crops – Legal-Commercial Regimes and their Food Security Implications
Drew L. Kershen

Agricultural trade between nations is a significant proportion of total international trade. Agricultural trade in transgenic crops faces extra complications due to the existence of domestic and international regimes (e.g. the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety) that focus specifically on agricultural biotechnology. These specialized regimes create legal and commercial challenges for trade in transgenic crops that have significant implications for the food security of the nations of the world.

I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to notice a consistent theme. While there are certainly useful applications for GM crops, I think it is clear that these seminar attendees are less concerned with environmental sustainability or public health and more concerned with removing any economic barriers to this lucrative market.

For the Vatican to stand up boldly and deny that the use of condoms would be a wise health policy in AIDS ravaged Africa and then claim that loosening trade barriers to experimental genetic manipulation in the world’s food system “has a great potential to improve the lives of the poor” leaves this author scratching his head in confusion. What exactly is being manipulated here, plant genes or the Pontifical Academy of Sciences?