| To: Retort From: MA [Miguel Altieri, a Berkeley agroecologist who opposed the transgenic biofuels research deal between BP and UC Berkeley, believes it is time to invoke the termination clause. Appended is Ignacio Chapela's text delivered in part [before being cut off in medias res] from the floor of the Academic Senate at the time of the BPerkeley deal, which was forged, in the phrase of one administrator, at "warp speed". Miguel and IC are colleagues in the College of Natural Resources, among a small number of faculty challenging the science of monoculture. IB] Miguel Altieri Daily Cal 26 vii 2010 In 2007, British Petroleum donated $500 million in research funds to UC Berkeley and partners to develop new sources of energy - primarily biotechnology to produce biofuel crops. Robert A. Malone, chairman and president of BP America Inc proclaimed BP was "joining some of the world's best science and engineering talent for improving and expanding the production of clean, renewable energy through the development of better crops." With what for BP was a relatively small investment, UC Berkeley's academic expertise, built over decades of public support, was recruited into a corporate partnership at the service of private interests. In fact in the Energy Biosciences Institute's 2009 annual report the Director was not shy in stating that "the mission of the institute is to provide ideas and innovations that supports the company's commitment to find new, more sustainable energy technologies." But all this public recruited talent did not help BP in preventing nor containing the oil spill that gushed more than 90 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days, constituting the worst ecological disaster in US history. This Berkeley-BP deal was signed without wide consultation with the faculty and despite warnings from a great number of faculty opposing such deal, UC Berkeley's administration chose to disregard the fact that BP is the oil company with the worst safety and environmental record of any oil company operating in the United States. British Petroleum has been the subject of roughly 8,000 reported incidents of spills, emissions and leaks of oil, chemicals and gases into the environment. The ecological costs of the oil spill yet to be revealed, will certainly result in the decline of dolphins, whale sharks and sea turtles, whose populations may not recover for years. Fish and shrimp-breeding habitats will have been destroyed. Deep coral reefs, which can take centuries to grow, will surely be affected, not to mention the livelihoods of thousands of people that depend on the Gulf's marine and coastal resources. Even if BP pays the full cost of damages, this sum which will cause little strain on BP's finances, will not cover the long-term and unpredictable ecological impacts that will last well beyond the time when lawsuits have been settled. But the ecological crisis of the Gulf started many years before the oil spill. Each year, nitrogen used to fertilize corn leaches from Midwest croplands into the Mississippi River and out into the gulf, where the fertilizer feeds giant algae blooms. As the algae dies, it settles to the ocean floor and decays, consuming oxygen and suffocating marine life. The Gulf's dead zone is an area roughly the size of New Jersey. No doubt that the oil spill will worsen the shallow-water dead zone. What is certain, however, is that the size of the dead zone fluctuates seasonally, as it is exacerbated by modern farming practices. The final irony is that BP's funded biofuel research at Berkeley is contributing to expand the "dead zone" by promoting large scale monoculture production of corn needed to yield the projected crop mass for ethanol, which requires the use of huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, major culprit for algal blooms and depletion of dissolved oxygen in coastal areas. The potential consequences for the environment and society of BP's funded research on biofuels at Berkeley are deeply disturbing. Many scientists have long predicted that the large-scale industrial boom in biofuels will be disastrous for farmers, the environment and consumers and now marine ecosystems. Under the circumstances, how can UC Berkeley justify in front of California's civil society its association with BP? A serious public debate on this whole program is overdue not only to hold the university accountable for its corporate funded research, but to explore initiatives that support truly sustainable and socially responsible alternatives to the energy and environmental crisis affecting the planet. It is time to apply the section of the UCB-BP agreement which refers to termination by Berkeley or other research collaborators, which reads: "In recognition of the public institutional nature of Berkeley, LBNL, and Illinois, if a discrete event were to occur or a change in facts and circumstances were to arise after the date of this Agreement, that Berkeley or any one or all of the other Research Collaborators were to reasonably determine that a continued association with EBI was not in accord with its fundamental principles, then at any time within one hundred eighty (180) days after the occurrence of such event Berkeley may terminate this Agreement". I would argue that a major change in facts and circumstances has already occurred. ------------------------- Text of Prof Ignacio Chapela's remarks from the Floor of the Academic Senate of the University of
California, Berkeley Division, March 2007: "This session will be portrayed as the latest
_expression_ of the vibrant democratic system of shared governance for
which Berkeley was once known. Far from it, this session is a
last-minute hurried afterthought by a leadership caught asleep at the
wheel, a session convened only because of the rising outrage and
opposition to the presence of British Petroleum on our campus. I have tried for size the word Prostitution as best describing that
for which the Chancellor and his associates would like us to sign. When faced with this concept, I have heard the proponents of this deal
simply shrug and say: "But at least we can agree that it IS a lot of
money - and even perhaps some science may come out of it!" So leaving
prostitution aside, why not glance at the science? I mean to say: the reason why you have not heard mention of even the concept of Conflict of Interest is precisely because nobody in the partnership seems to recognize the idea. To my knowledge the last time Conflict of Interest was considered worth visiting, again involved the Novartis-Berkeley deal. One of the overseers of that Deal, Prof Jasper Rine, stated in his legal declaration on conflict of interest caused by his simultaneous involvement in private and public science-making: "the possibility of conflict of interest is non-existent, since the science happening in my lab at Berkeley is exactly the same as the science happening in [my outside company]." A curious but clearly faulty definition of the concept, I should point out. It is not surprising then to see that conflict of interest levels that would have been considered unthinkable even a decade ago would not deserve even a note in the BP-Berkeley designs. The conflicts and mutual-self-serving dealings are many, large and very complex, but once again in eight minutes we are reduced to a mention of a few examples. BP-boosters propose to focus on grasses and other "DNA circuits" controlled by a company in Walnut Creek called Mendel Biotechnology. Mendel is thus a major, little-mentioned partner in this deal. Mendel has an alliance with Monsanto, the world's monopoly of transgenic seeds, for more than $40 milllion dollars. This long-term relationship includes a VicePresident of Monsanto on Mendel's board; in their words, their reciprocal interests are "highly aligned". So it stands to legal reason --by some standard I suppose-- that there would be no conflict of interest between BP, Berkeley, Mendel, Monsanto, and the deployment of their products for profit over more than 200 million acres of transgenic (excuse me, "Synthetic Biology") crops? In this proposal, Berkeley is nothing but a business partner with these corporations, professors entrepreneurs and students simply cheap labor, paying high fees for the privilege of giving their work to the right corporation. Principals in Mendel's Board of Directors and Scientific Advisory Board are Prof. Brian Staskawicz, of Berkeley, and Prof. Stephen Long of the University of Illinois (the other business partner in this Proposal). Both entrepreneurs' interests inside campus and out are probably so identical that they do not need to worry about conflict of interest. Whether their students can maintain such clear alignment in their allegiance between finding out what is true and publicly desirable and finding out what is profitable might be a different question. Chris Sommerville, CEO of Mendel, has been apparently rushed in to Berkeley through a secretive and highly irregular flash-hire process to be safely on the UC side as a professor for the signing of the agreement. His campus interviews, behind closed doors, apparently happened last Tuesday, although the Chancellor had already announced more than a month ago that he would unilaterally appoint him. Not surprisingly, there is no outward sign that the Academic Senate even knew about all this. Oh, I nearly forgot: Mr Sommerville's wife is reportedly also getting another professorial position at Berkeley through the same process - I am not sure what she does professionally. Of course, no contract will be official without the signature of the Regents but here again, the Chair of the Regents, Richard Blum, stands in multi-million-dollar conflict of interest over his financial engagement with "development" corporations that are already signed on to begin the digging and concrete-pouring in Strawberry Canyon, as has been well documented by investigative journalist Peter Byrne. Prof. Dan Kammen's description of the goals here is appropriate, and seems to describe the real environmental interest in the BP-Berkeley proposal: He said that the goal of the BP-Berkeley deal was "to generate an ecosystem of companies". We now have an inkling of the "biodiversity" making up this "innovation environment"; now we know that what is really meant here is a trophic web of favoritism that would have shamed the Soviet system, in an environment of profit-driven conflict of interest.
As the smell of depolymerization (British Petroleum-word for
decomposition) continues to emerge from the extraordinary proposition,
few stop to ask what else would BP get out of all this. It is not all bad. I want to thank the many students and faculty
who are awakening to the situation of their university, the public of
California and the world who understand what is at stake and will hold
us accountable for it, as they are doing here tonight. I Believe that I stand here for a majority within this campus,
throughout the State and in the world who also believe that the time has
come to re-take control of our institutions as the only possible way
forward from the enormous environmental and social catastrophe that we
are already living through. |