Recently a Jewish friend lent me "Night", the heartrending memoir of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Part way through, I suddenly realised that Wiesel was writing about his experience of life as a slave labourer in the Auschwitz work camp of IG Farben - the massive industrial conglomerate formed in the inter-war years by Germany's main chemical corporations: BASF, Bayer and Hoechst. Primo Levi also ended up as a slave labourer in the very same work camp and we've included extracts about their experiences there in the history of Bayer, which comes from our new website. (http://www.gmwatch.org/gm-firms)

There we note: "The GM firms present themselves as operating out of futuristic laboratories and hi-tech greenhouses in order to provide farmers with innovative crops with valuable new traits. But in reality, all the leading GM firms developed out of the chemical industry and they remain the world's biggest manufacturers of agrochemicals. The leading GM corporations together control nearly 75% of the global pesticide market.

....Having operated for many decades as major chemical corporations, and in the last 20 years additionally as biotechnology companies, the leading GM firms have a significant historical legacy. This makes it possible to examine their records when it comes to issues of public and employee safety and protection, regulatory compliance, customer
care, etc.

This is particularly relevant to the regulation of GM crops, as it is almost entirely dependent on trust, with regulators normally basing their assessments of environmental risk and food safety on data from unpublished studies provided to them in confidence by the GM firms that developed the crop.  In our site (http://www.gmwatch.org/gm-firms) we look at the corporate character and record to date of the
major GM firms."

At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, the Chief Prosecutor, stated: "These companies, not the lunatic Nazi fanatics, are the main war criminals." He went on to warn that if the truth about their terrible corporate crimes wasn't fully exposed and dealt with, they'd pose a much greater threat to the future than even "Hitler if he were still alive."

Today it is vital that we do finally face up to the corporate character and record of the companies poised to take control of the worlds's food supply.

(By Jonathan Matthews, GMWatch, 17/08/2009)