Feature

The world is hungry for justice, not genetics

Claims that genetically modified foods will help eradicate famine are bogus says Sarah Sexton, who examines the links between corporate greed and human hunger

To a world regularly confronted with harrowing images of starving people, the claim that genetically modified (GM) crops will feed growing numbers of people in the Third World has great moral appeal. Its proponents seem responsible, even altruistic.

But the claim is deeply misleading. It assumes people are starving because there is not enough food to go around and overlooks the real causes of malnutrition, starvation and famine. Enough food is already being produced to provide everyone in the world with a nutritious and adequate diet – in fact 1.5 times the amount required, according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme.

Yet at least a seventh of the world’s population – some 800 million people – go hungry because they do not have the money to buy food, do not have access to land on which to grow food, or do not live in a country with a state welfare system.

Unfair and inequitable political and economic structures, combined with ecological degradation, marginalise poorer people the world over, depriving them of the means to eat. Genetic engineering in agriculture will do nothing to address these underlying structural causes of hunger: on the contrary, it could exacerbate them.

Commercial dominance

Few of the foods being developed are foods which people in the Third World can afford or will consume. The two GM crops being grown commercially in the United States are soya beans and maize (corn): 90-95 per cent of soya bean harvests and 60 per cent of traded maize are consumed not by humans but by livestock.

Converting animal feed into meat is a singularly inefficient means of supplying people with protein. GM feed crops will do little to relieve hunger in countries where many people do not eat meat. Even where they do, meat tends to be consumed by people who are relatively wealthy and already well-fed.

Much genetic engineering is concerned with the commercial needs of food processors and retailers rather than the nutritional needs of poorer consumers. Research is being devoted to developing techniques for delayed ripening or rotting of fruits and vegetables, to improve their appearance, allow them to be transported over ever greater distances and lengthen their shelf life.

Monsanto’s high-starch potato, for example, has been developed to make commercially-grown potatoes more suitable for deep frying in fast food outlets. The European Union has funded research into making GM cauliflower leaves stay green for longer so the vegetables appear fresher – despite the fact most people do not eat the leaves.

GM soya not used for animal feed goes into processed foods: an estimated 60 per cent of processed foods – bread, ready-made meals, sauces, biscuits, cakes and chocolate –contain substances derived from GM soya. A debate is now raging about the long-term effect modified soya has on human and animal health.

Consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables is declining among low-income groups in Britain. This stems partly from retail systems geared around long-distance transport of foods which genetic engineering facilitates. Poorer people without cars find it more difficult to reach out-of-town supermarkets and have to shop at convenience stores or small, independent supermarkets whose prices are higher than the supermarket chains and where food may be less fresh. Such a food system is energy and resource-intensive and pollutes the environment.

Threat to seed crops

An estimated 1.4 billion farm families grow 15-20 per cent of the world’s food from seeds saved from previous harvests. Much of this food, particularly that grown by women, is not sold but eaten or bartered by the household. It tends to be omitted from official food production figures.

However the food engineering industry is attempting to prevent farmers from saving and exchanging seeds and if it is successful, many of these farmers will instead have to buy their seeds every year. The costs of GM crops are likely to drive many small and medium-sized farmers into debt and bankruptcy, potentially leading to landlessness and, ultimately, destitution and hunger.

US farmers buying seed engineered to be tolerant to Monsanto’s proprietary herbicide Roundup, have to sign a contract stating that they will not save any transgenic seed for the following year’s planting. Monsanto has allegedly used private detectives to identify farmers violating their contract and several have been sued. Before GM soya bean seeds were introduced, an estimated 20-30 per cent of all soya bean fields in the American Midwest were planted with saved seed.

Monsanto’s ultimate threat comes from so-called ‘terminator technology’: incorporating two or three novel genes into a plant which cause its seed, if planted, to die in the early stages of germination.

Besides buying GM seeds, farmers will also have to buy chemical herbicides and fertilisers. Herbicide use in Southern hemisphere countries, particularly on smaller farms, is low because it is cheaper to employ people to get rid of weeds.

Small farmers, already hard-pressed by competition from heavily subsidised EU and US food imports are likely to slide into debt to finance these extra costs. The result will be farm bankruptcies, leading to an increased concentration of land in the hands of wealthier farmers and speculators.

Landless households would then have to buy food. How much food and what kind would depend on their ability to earn money or on the state’s willingness to support them. Many of those displaced would find themselves in a saturated labour market, trying to get insecure, low-paid jobs in cities or on larger farms, where workers are paid piece rates. Real wages for labourers have been reducing rapidly in many Third World countries. Labourers in export crop plantations are particularly vulnerable to exploitative wages and poor working conditions.

Unsustainable agriculture

About two-thirds of GM crops being grown commercially have been modified to be tolerant of a specific herbicide. Monsanto, for instance, has created soya beans, cotton, oilseed rape, corn and sugarbeet resistant to its top-selling weedkiller, Roundup, whose active ingredient, glyphosate, kills most plants.

Just as bacteria which cause animal and human illness have developed resistance to antibiotics, so too weeds in or near fields of GM crops will gradually become resistant to the herbicide. The impact of chemical herbicides is well-documented. They reduce soil fertility, pollute water, kill earthworms and beneficial microbes, and have significant short and long-term effects on human health.

The next most common application of genetic engineering in agriculture is the development of crops which produce their own insecticide. In theory, such crops would seem to eliminate the need for chemical insecticides (benefiting farm workers’ and consumers’ health and protecting the soil) and reducing crop loss caused by insects.

But just as herbicide-resistant crops are likely to trigger the evolution of ‘super weeds’, so these crops could accelerate the evolution of ‘super bugs’ which are resistant to the plant’s engineered toxin or which switch to eating other plants.

Some scientists believe that the window during which these genetically-engineered products will be effective is less than a decade, perhaps only three to four years. From a corporate perspective, this only adds to the pressure to rush these products on to the market before competitors.

Crop loss due to weeds, pests and diseases is a significant problem, accounting for an estimated 10-40 per cent of the world’s gross agricultural production. By far the highest crop losses, however, are on farms where crops are grown in monocultures and regularly sprayed with chemicals. Monocultures greatly increase the food supply for specific pest populations and, if crops are not rotated, create a permanent niche for pests. Pesticide use can result in vicious circles of pest resistance, elimination of natural predators and ever increased reliance on chemicals.

GM crops are designed for this industrial system of monocultures and will do nothing to address the root causes of crop losses due to pests. Far from solving problems such as pesticide resistance, water pollution and soil degradation caused by agrochemicals, these crops are likely to accentuate them.

Cross-pollination between GM crops and non-engineered varieties or wild relatives could undermine food security still further. The sheer numbers of genetically-engineered organisms being released into the environment through field trials and commercial growing make it almost inevitable that some of the novel genes – particularly those which confer survival advantages to plants such as herbicide tolerance and pest resistance – will persist, spread uncontrollably and affect ecosystems in unpredictable ways. Cross-pollination has already been demonstrated in several field experiments.

North America and Europe have few genetic relatives of crops such as rice or soya beans to which modified genes could spread through cross-pollination. But many of the Southern countries where genetically-engineered crops may be grown – including China, India, Thailand, South Africa and Brazil – are the original homes of these crops.

Acknowledging these concerns, the industry argues that its ‘terminator technology’ would prevent any offspring of GM crops and their natural relatives from germinating. But the terminator technology could also spread to neighbouring food crops, with potentially calamitous effects on food production.

The adoption of GM crops is likely to reduce genetic diversity, resulting in fewer and fewer types of crops. This narrowing adds to the likelihood of pest and disease epidemics. Splicing the odd new gene into an already restricted set of cultivars does nothing to compensate for the massive loss in the base of genetic diversity which had been painstakingly built up and developed in myriad domesticated varieties through millennia of small farmers’ innovative breeding efforts. And today’s GM crops do not have significantly increased yields; in some cases, their yields are lower than those of conventional crops.

Other food sources are likely to be lost if GM crops become widespread, particularly those requiring the use of herbicides. Rice paddies, for instance, have customarily provided fish, shrimp, crabs, edible herbs and weeds, frogs and medicines as well as rice. These would be killed or damaged by herbicides.

Choice? What choice?

Given the ecological, economic and social risks, many farmers – if they had access to full information – might prefer not to grow GM crops. But genetic engineering companies and their allies are moving rapidly to deny farmers this choice.

Mergers, takeovers, joint ventures and licensing agreements between plant breeding companies, seed distributors, grain traders, chemical companies and genetic engineering interests have resulted in some genetic engineering companies gaining a near-monopoly over the growing and marketing of agricultural commodities.

Ten multi-nationals have cornered almost 40 per cent of the world seed market. Monsanto estimates half the US grain industry is now using its genetically-modified seed; it expects that by next year all soya beans planted in the US will be its Roundup Ready variety.

In the immediate future, it is likely that farmers in the North will be most directly affected by this monopoly control. But within a few years the only soya beans Monsanto is likely to offer Japan will be its genetically-modified variety.

In Ireland, where Monsanto and Swiss company Novartis are trying to get approval for commercial growing of Roundup Ready sugar beet, Monsanto has warned that Novartis, the country’s major supplier of sugar beet seed, may find it ‘uneconomic’ to ‘continue to supply traditional seed to the Irish market’.

The advent of terminator technology will hasten the industry’s eagerness to exploit the potential market of those farmers who currently save seeds from year to year. As Monsanto’s chief executive, Bob Shapiro, has said: ‘It is truly easy to make a great deal of money dealing with very primary needs: food, shelter, clothing.’

Seed companies may take conventional varieties off the market or use existing seed and patent legislation to restrict farmers growing such varieties. Companies are also channelling agricultural research through the judicious use of grants to universities and agricultural colleges. By soaking up vast research funds, genetic engineering is denying money for research into other forms of agriculture – such as inter-cropping and crop rotation – that are far more effective in pest control and less damaging to the environment.

Alternative routes

Ensuring worldwide food security requires an approach to agriculture that is, in almost every respect, the reverse of that being promoted by biotechnology companies and their allies in governments and regulatory authorities. Instead of policies concentrating control in the hands of large landowners, corporations and distant bureaucrats, food security demands policies that increase the ability of smallholders and family farmers to exercise local and regional control over food production, distribution and marketing.

Such policies would include redistributive agrarian reforms, strengthened tenancy legislation, a redirection of public investment towards staple food crops, and enforcement of competition policies to break up corporate monopolies.

Instead of requiring countries to liberalise their agricultural markets, food security demands respect for nations’ rights to achieve the level of food self-sufficiency and nutritional quality they consider appropriate, without suffering retaliation. The World Trade Organisation’s agricultural agreements, which require countries to open up their agricultural markets to imports, should be renegotiated.

Legislation permitting patents to be taken out on genes and genetically-engineered organisms, including plants and animals, should be revoked, and farmers’ rights to save seeds protected in international law. Instead of encouraging the further industrialisation of agriculture, food security demands policies that favour non-chemical production with the genuine goal of reducing or eliminating the use of pesticides and other agrochemicals.

Many farmers around the globe are turning their backs on chemical agriculture to embrace regenerative farming methods that often bring higher yields while sustaining soil and other aspects of the agro-ecosystem upon which long-term food production depends. For as long as access to food depends upon money, and poorer people are excluded from food markets or land, significant numbers of people will be malnourished, hungry and starving – whatever happens to the global food supply and whatever happens to the number of people in the world.

This is an edited extract from Food? Health? Hope? Genetic Engineering and World Hunger, a 28-page briefing paper available from The CornerHouse, PO Box 3137, Station Road, Sturminster Newton, Dorset DT10 1YJ, UK. Price: £2, or free by email: cornerhouse@gn.apc.org.