Raising a Stink in Cologne
Food
was fundamental in European newspapers this weekend. An item in Britain's
Observer Sunday reported that world leaders meeting at the
G-8 summit in Cologne, Germany, designated genetically modified food as one of
the "greatest threats facing the planet"--along with AIDS and the millennium
bug. The topic of GM food has been widely debated in Europe but is seldom
raised in the United States, where, according to the Observer , "some 70
million acres of modified soya beans, tomatos, wheat and cotton are now grown."
(For more on national attitudes to GM foods, see the Economist 's
cover story.) Saturday's Guardian
featured a long piece about GM crops in India and reported that a group of 500
Indian farmers went to Cologne to protest what they see as Monsanto Co.'s
attempts to make farmers dependent on genetically modified cotton crops.
Meanwhile, all over Europe there were reports of increasing consumer anxiety
about the safety of foods ranging from poultry to cooking oil to Coca-Cola.
The
Kosovo conflict was not forgotten, as papers around the continent encouraged
NATO to maintain a stiff spine regarding the demilitarization of the Kosovo
Liberation Army--a matter apparently resolved Monday morning. Spanish
conservative daily ABC
said, "The KLA, which has not been a military arm of the alliance during the
campaign, cannot now be its political partner. As just one of the parts of the
conflict, the KLA should subject itself to the authority of KFOR and disarm
itself." In Germany, Tagesspiegel of Berlin said, "It is understandable that the
KLA wants to remain armed in case of possible Serb attacks in the future. But
Nato in its military movements can't consider that during these critical days,
as they work to prevent a security vacuum with the Serb withdrawal. ... If the
principles of the G-8 states are to be believably achieved and the chance of a
multiethnic Kosovo, at least at the starting point, is to be retained, then the
KLA must also let itself be disarmed."
Also
on the subject of Kosovo, a leader in Saturday's Independent of London
counseled against analogy creep. It said, "There have been rather too many
emotive analogies drawn with the Nazi Holocaust, which are in danger of
clouding the truth rather than illuminating it. ... Language is important and,
although the Serbian state pursued a policy of vilification, expulsion and
murder against the ethnic Albanians, it did not amount to genocide. ... If
there are 10,000 dead in Kosovo that is a terrible crime, but it is not the
same as the hundreds of thousands that were once feared. There is a parallel
between Hitler's ambition for a racially pure Greater Germany and Milosevic's
ethnically homogenous Greater Serbia, but Milosevic was not working towards a
Final Solution; he did not aspire to world domination; he did not espouse an
ideology of eugenics."
Returning to a still-unresolved earlier conflict, an editorial in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post came out in support of an
Anglo-Dutch proposal designed to ease the West's "economic stranglehold" on
Iraq. As the SCMP observed, although it was "[r]ecently overshadowed by
the conflict in Kosovo," for 10 years now the West has used "tough sanctions
and low-intensity bombing, which has taken place on average once every three
days" to battle Saddam Hussein's regime, without "having the required effect."
The new proposal would set strict conditions under which the West would lift
the economic embargo and foreign companies would be allowed to bid on contracts
to rebuild "the country's shattered oil industry." According to the
SCMP , "[I]t is now time to break the deadlock by pushing forward with
this humane proposal." Nevertheless, the plan was denounced in the Iraqi press,
where the government paper al-Jumhouriya said, "The vicious British
draft has even exceeded the unjust and cruel resolutions by the Security
Council against Iraq."
In
other media matters, intervention by Canada's ruling Liberal Party has delayed
conservative newspaper magnate Conrad Black's elevation to Britain's House of
Lords. Black, a Canadian who owns Britain's Telegraph newspapers,
Israel's Jerusalem Post , and most of Canada's dailies, had been advised
by Canadian officials that he would be able to accept a lordship, for which he
was nominated by Conservative Party leader William Hague, if he took out dual
British-Canadian citizenship. With the intervention of British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, Black received a British passport, but the week before the honors
were announced, Ottawa reversed its position and declared that a 1919 law
prevents Canadians from receiving peerages. Black told his Canadian flagship
the National
Post that "as a Canadian citizen I find the conduct of our government
slightly embarrassing." The London Times , the Telegraph 's main rival, said that
by this fall Canadian legal reforms should make the peerage possible and noted
rather archly that "[t]he prestige of a noble title is now within Mr Black's
grasp, but ... he must wait, until the autumn, before the prize is securely
his. The delay should not, however, prove too trying. Mr Black has, after all,
been anticipating the pleasure of a peerage for almost a decade."
The
last British royal wedding of the millennium--Saturday's marriage of Queen
Elizabeth's youngest son Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones--was the occasion for the
recently installed poet laureate's first official ode. Andrew Motion's poem
"Epithalamium" (read it here--free registration for the Times site
required) was described as "safe" and "traditional" in the Independent ,
but novelist J.G. Ballard told the Times , "The poem proves that it's
time to discontinue the office of Poet Laureate in the hope that the Royal
Family will follow soon after."
