Biotech Will Strike Blow at Small Farms

In the editorial lauding the ``Flavr Savr'' tomato (`` `Franken-Veggie' Fears,'' June 1), The Christian Science Monitor maintains that critics ``do a public disservice when they raise exaggerated fears about biotechnology.'' Yet you fail to mention that most of these concerns are economic as well as biological.

Biotechnology will almost certainly hasten the concentration of farming in the hands of multinational agribusiness companies able to finance high-tech laboratories, speeding the demise of small growers already ``statistically insignificant'' in the eyes of the United States census.

The deterioration of small communities and local economies, and the replacement of local loyalties and responsibilities with the insatiable materialist ethos of the industrial marketplace, is not an ``exaggerated fear'' but a daily reality. Steven Krolak, Santa Barbara, Calif.

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