June 23-29, 2005

fine print

BIO Adversity

Brian Hickey and Lee Norsworthy

One police officer, beloved by his peers, lay dying in the street of what was preliminarily deemed a heart attack. Fellow officers are seen on the front page of the next day's Daily News trying in vain to resuscitate him.

Thousands of protesters — some dressed as tomatoes and cornstalks; others waving signs reading "Pesticide Kills" and "Global Health not Corporate Wealth" — tone down their Tuesday-night events in its wake. By just rallying against the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), which held its annual convention at the Pennsylvania Convention Center Sunday through Wednesday, it's safe to say that BioDemocracy 2005, the seventh annual BIO counter-conference, made a mark here. A few hours after the clash occurred — at around 12:30 p.m. a few hundred protesters encountered police in the 1200 block of Arch St.; following a brief scuffle, 19-year police veteran Paris Williams collapsed onto the pavement — BioDemocracy 2005 issued a press release expressing condolences for the fallen officer.

"We gathered in Philadelphia today to celebrate and protect life, and any loss of life is a tragedy to us all," it read.

Though their masses paled in comparison to the 2000 Republican National Convention protests, they'll be long remembered in Philadelphia — despite the fact that blame has yet to be assigned for the fatality. It could get even trickier in coming days; by nightfall, City Paper was receiving e-mails from protesters claiming they'd been mistreated. One read, "I was hit in the face by a police officer at Love Park today I was shooting video footage of a kid getting strangled and beat to the ground."

BioDemocracy has its roots in the July 1998 "First International Grassroots Gathering on Biodevastation," where activists demonstrated in front of massive biotechnology corporation Monsanto's world headquarters. Those couple hundred demonstrators didn't get so much as a peek down the long, gated driveway to the company's building. They did, however, set into motion American activists' involvement in the international fight against biotechnology abuses, a movement that has seen greater success in other countries.

State and local governments relentlessly sing the industry's praises while courting its companies to set up operations near their home bases; BioDemocracy tells a different story. Its four-day protest dedicated much of its attention to agriculture, an industry for which, according to Brian Tokar, BioDemocracy 2005 organizer and director of the Biotechnology Project at the Institute for Social Ecology, the use of genetic engineering is "completely without merit." BIO's Daniel Eramian, however, describes the activists' positions as "amorphous," claiming that many "don't understand the technology and what it's being used for." It remains to be seen whether the protesters' message will be lost in the wake of a police officer's untimely death.