MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

MONTREAL

by Kevin Carey

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KEVIN CAREY looks at the implications of the Montreal agreement on GMO food and shows how the battle will shift to information.

The fallen trees of Versailles have won their first victory, symbolically enough, in Montreal; the old world, scarred by the misconduct of the new, has drawn a line on the soil of a former colony and has not budged. That is the only conclusion to be drawn from the final agreement on genetically modified food. Except for Mr. Al Gore's fund-raisers, nobody will be sorry. Mr. Clinton calculated, selfishly perhaps, that his own place in history was more important than the plenitude of the Vice President's coffers.

Doubtless there will be a perpetual anthill of wrangling but two basic principles have been established that it will be difficult to overturn:

• the first is that perceptions of health are legally more important than free trade; and
• the second is that there are institutional frameworks more powerful than the World Trade Organisation.

What made these breakthroughs possible were the chaos in Seattle and the hurricanes which ravaged France just after Christmas. The first event has been well covered but the second requires a little elucidation.

The French, with a lack of sentimentality in agricultural matters which infuriates the English, have persistently thought of their countryside as a roofless factory; and with a consistency equally maddening to the English, they have not preached ecological nicety to others that they are not prepared to impose on themselves. They tested nuclear bombs in the Pacific and loathed Greenpeace; they rammed cereals into chalk and rubbish into cattle. In a collective European Union trade negotiation their ecological indifference was a bar to progress. Then the winds struck and it came home to people and politicians that there is a human cause behind the unseasonal nastiness.

This is only the first major blow in the struggle to control the much-vaunted inevitability of uncontrolled world trade.

One reason why the struggle will continue is the simple urgency of the environmental case; we can see ourselves destroying our planet past reverse but there is a second and perhaps even stronger, paradoxical motivation; the very wealth we have will drive us to want other things.

Deprived of the life-absorbing urge to make money we will want to be absorbed by something else. Eternally ungrateful, we will punish the prodigal but unruly beast which has given us what we have.

The chief battleground between laissez faire international capitalism and the equally strong urge to exercise control will not be fought in or for the fields and forests but for and over the communications system that succeeds the Internet.

We should not think of this, as American classicists frequently do, as a struggle between liberty and state power; "laissez faire" is an anachronistic label for social Darwinism and a beast without a predator is an unpleasant phenomenon.

The dispute might be better characterised as a struggle for control between a small number of morally indifferent leviathans on the one hand and a countless swarm of heterogeneous moralists on the other.

It seems odd that self-styled religious moralists should favour that indifference over their own private preferences just because these can only be exercised with a little help from Washington, D.C., or, put it another way, it is difficult to see how global plurality can be preserved without a little prompting from Capitol Hill. The very diversity of libertarian concerns requires the cohesive protection of legislation.

Here again the French have been maddeningly prescient, their sheer bloody-minded chauvinism having turned out to be the apogee of virtue.

Throughout the 1990s they were derided for holding out against the tidal wave of Californian trash served up on television and in the cinema. They wanted rules for the preservation of local content creation. They were told that satellite technology would destroy their policy.

They were right to stand up for quality because, in the long run, it pays.

On a recent trip to Avignon we were flanked in a restaurant by two parties eating salad and burgers and drinking Miller Lite and Coke.

I can say that I enjoyed my Boeuf Bourgignon and bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pape in spite of the interminable prattle about family tensions and therapists which left no room for any consideration of the architecture of the Papal Schism and I am sure that monsieur enjoyed my settlement much more than that of my neighbours.

So it is with the media; in a world where content not traffic will be the primary source of income and wealth, an endless procession of uniformly toothed, emotionally precious family entertainments will not hit the spot any more accurately than a much nastier procession of uniformly pistoled, emotionally illiterate adult entertainments.

It is quite as boring, as demonstrated by the falling viewing figures for Italian non-stop pornography channels, to watch the same kind of people doing the same kind of thing whether it is shooting, being shot, never taking your underwear off or never putting your underwear on.

Having said that, whether we are thinking of 'mechanically reclaimed meat' or soap operas, the poor require protection from the mediocrity they can afford.

In the Information Age to be ignorant is to starve intellectually, and to a growing extent physically.

Just because the prevailing orthodoxy in the United States is against protecting the poor from anything does not mean that Europeans will be equally socially irresponsible.

The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, disciple of the free market, has been harassed almost beyond endurance by the stubbornness of continental Europeans who wish to incur high economic costs in order to retain some social cohesion. His argument is that social costs damage economic performance and that the only social prop required by the disadvantaged is formal education.

This is the argument of Gradgrind, of high Victorian materialism preached in parallel with self-regarding religiosity yet, in the end, it was good design that made money in the industrial age not the mass production of trash. It is Blair's paradox that the very education he advocates will lead to a stronger social movement for a better quality of life, of a social environment where our own self-interest - as opposed to selfishness - requires that we accord to others what we would have accorded to us.

It is no irony that the word most often used of the French is "sophisticated".

We are moving into a more sophisticated age and those who confine themselves to the repetitive and mundane will find themselves replaced by robots, silicon or human. It might have been more symmetrical if the headlines had concentrated on the toppled trees of Disneyworld Paris but the symbolism of Versailles is much more powerful.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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