 |
By Carl Pope
What's behind the world food crisis? Yes, the growing world population
is a huge contributor to the need for more food. Yes, reckless
food-and oil-seed-based biofuel subsidies have added to the problem.
Yes, the climate crisis will contribute enormously. Yes, greater
prosperity by previously vegetarian consumers in India and China
will increase demand for feed grains.
But the media only occasionally touch on why we are having this
particular food crisis: market fundamentalism and the privatization
of world food security. Sunday's New York Times has a devastating
article on the dismantling over the past 20 years of the network
of publicly funded and accountable agricultural research centers.
What was supposed to take the place of public research? Privatized,
market-driven, corporate research. How were they going to ensure
food security? By developing genetically modified foods. What would
motivate them? Profit - geared to patented GMO (genetically
modified organism) seed varieties. These patented seeds would cost
more, but farmers' yields would go up so much that the world would
be better off. Unfortunately, the hard truth is that GMOs have
actually made the world's food supply smaller — because the
varieties developed for crops like soy beans and cotton, thus far
at least, have yields that are lower than the conventional strains
they replace.
This might mean that GMO crops simply can't produce the continually
increasing crop yields that their advocates have promised. But
it is also fair to say that we have no real idea whether they can
or can't, because the privatized market for developing GMOs has
almost no interest in crop yield per se - it has been developed
for purposes such as making crops that are more tolerant of the
herbicide Roundup.
In fact, the Department of Agriculture concedes that not a single
GMO crop on today's market was designed to increase yields. By
contrast, the entire focus of the publicly funded agricultural
research that led to the Green Revolution was increased yields.
For years a staple of the literature advocating GMO crops has
been salt-tolerant barley for marginal soils in Africa. I'm not
a crop scientist, so I have no idea whether salt-tolerant barley
is feasible - and if it is feasible, no idea whether GMO crops
are the most likely pathway to develop it. But I know enough economics
to be pretty sure that Monsanto won't get rich selling the seeds
of a GMO salt-tolerant barley to marginal farmers in Mauritania - the
market is neither big enough nor rich enough. Wheat farmers in
the Dakotas are a much better investment for Monsanto, especially
when they are backed by huge crop subsidies, and the company has
followed the market signals. As a result, virtually all the crops
emerging from the privatized corporate agricultural research establishment
are designed not to increase yields or to lower costs but to increase
resistance to herbicides or a narrow range of first-world pests.
Even today, we don't need GMO rice to fight the current devastating
outbreak of brown plant hopper on Asian rice fields. The International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has identified more than a dozen
conventional varieties that could produce resistance if they were
crossbred into the commercial types in common use in Asia. But
the IRRI lacks the funds to do the necessary work. And private
seed companies lack the financial inventive, because the hopper
continually evolves, so even if a private food corporation developed
a resistant variety, it could market it for only a few years. Seed
sales just wouldn't make a big enough profit.
As a result, we have poor farmers in India committing suicide
because their GMO cotton crops didn't meet expectations or failed;
we have governments trembling from Haiti to Afghanistan because
their people can no longer afford to eat; we have newly empowered
pests chewing their way through the world's rice paddy fields;
we have inadequate stores of grain to survive even modest droughts
in Australia -- and we act as if this should be a surprise.
It's not as if this is a new problem. At least as far back as the
Irish potato famine, it has been clear that unregulated markets
can't handle the inevitable ups and downs of food production. Ireland
actually had plenty of food to feed itself, but Victorian market
fundamentalists insisted that most of it be exported. Then, as
now, intentional public policy was needed to avoid famine and starvation.
Dare we hope that this fall that the Presidential candidates will
actually be asked about this issue? Only if we insist. And the
debate will be meaningful only if we ask the hard questions about
why we have abandoned publicly funded and accountable agricultural
policy mechanisms for the long-discredited concept that privatization
of research and market fundamentalism will feed the world.
|
|
