I've been in the country enjoying tulip fields and quaint little German towns and monasteries and very tall, snow-covered mountains. Sorry there are so many posts I haven't answered--I will be trying to catch up. Ish, I thought I would send this little discussion to you re the REAL motivation behind genetic engineering (profits) and why golden rice is not necessary (nor effective). But I would urge anyone involved in the GMO/sustainable agriculture debate to read it. It's by author and environmentalist John Robbins (the Baskin Robbins heir who gave up ice cream and his fortune to speak out about saving the planet from ruin):
Can GMOs help feed the hungry?
Dear John,
Isn’t the uncertain, undocumented potential risk of GM foods preferable to the very certain and imminent danger of starvation of millions of the world’s people? How can you and other over-zealous environmentalists stand in the way of the hungry being fed?
Sue
Dear Sue,
You are not alone in hoping that genetically modified (GM) foods might bring solutions to malnutrition and world hunger.
These hopes were never more dramatically illustrated than in 2000, when Time magazine ran a cover story titled “Grains of Hope.” The article joyfully announced the development of a genetically engineered “golden rice.” This new strain of GM rice has had genes from viruses and daffodils spliced into its genetic instructions. The result is a form of rice that is a golden-yellow color (much like daffodil flowers), and that produces beta-carotene, which the human body normally converts into vitamin A.
Nearly a million children die every year because they are weakened by vitamin A deficiencies, and an additional 350,000 go blind. Golden rice, said Time, will be a godsend for the half of humanity that depends on rice for its major staple. Merely eating this rice could prevent blindness and death.
The development of golden rice was, it seemed, compelling and inspiring evidence that GM crops are the answer to malnutrition and hunger. Time quoted former U.S. President Jimmy Carter: “Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy, starvation is.”
Shortly after the Time cover story, Monsanto and other biotechnology companies launched a $50 million marketing campaign, including $32 million in TV and print advertising. The ads, complete with soft focus fields and smiling children, said that “biotech foods could help end world hunger.”
Other ad campaigns have followed. One Monsanto ad tells the public: “Biotechnology is one of tomorrow’s tools in our hands today. Slowing its acceptance is a luxury our hungry world cannot afford.”
Within a few months, the biotech industry had spent far more on these ads than it had on developing golden rice. Their purpose? “Unless I’m missing something,” wrote Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine, “the aim of this audacious new advertising campaign is to impale people like me—well-off first-worlders dubious about genetically engineered food—on the horns of a moral dilemma… If we don’t get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind.”
The implication of the ads is that lifesaving food is being held hostage by anti-science activists.
In the years since Time proclaimed the promises of golden rice, however, we’ve learned a few things you might bear in mind the next time you see one of these commercials.
For one thing, we’ve learned that golden rice will not grow in the kinds of soil that it must to be of value to the world’s hungry. To grow properly, it requires heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides — expensive inputs unaffordable to the very people the variety is supposed to help. And we’ve also learned that golden rice requires large amounts of water—water that might not be available in precisely those areas where vitamin A deficiency is a problem, and where farmers cannot afford expensive irrigation projects.
And one more thing—it turns out that golden rice doesn’t work, even in theory. Malnourished people are not able to absorb vitamin A in this form. And even if they could, they’d have to eat an awful lot of the stuff. In order to satisfy his minimum requirement for the vitamin, an eleven-year-old boy would have to eat 27 bowls of golden rice a day.
I’m sure that given enough time and enough money, some viable genetically modified (GM) crops could be developed that contain more nutrients or have higher yields. But I’m not sure that even if that happens, it will benefit the world’s poor. Monsanto and the other biotech companies aren’t developing these seeds with the intention of giving them away. If people can’t afford to buy GM seeds, or if they can’t afford the fertilizers and pesticides the seeds require, they’ll be left out.
Poverty is at the root of the problem of hunger. As Peter Rosset, director of Food First, reminds us, “People do not have vitamin A deficiency because rice contains too little vitamin A, but because their diet has been reduced to rice and almost nothing else.”
And what, pray tell, has reduced these people to such poverty and their diets to such meager fare? In the words of the British writer George Monbiot, “The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolized by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech industry is to capture and monopolize the sources of wealth and the means of production…
“GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes which give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can’t be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all.
“No one in her right mind would welcome this, so the corporations must persuade us to focus on something else… We are told that…by refusing to eat GM products, we are threatening the developing world with starvation, an argument that is, shall we say, imaginative…”
With rare exceptions, genetically engineered crops are being created not because they’re productive or because they address real human needs, but because they’re patentable. They are not being developed to help subsistence farmers feed themselves.
The biotech companies have invested billions of dollars because they sense in this technology the potential for enormous profit, and the means to gain control over the world’s food supply. It is increasingly obvious that if they succeed, the poor will not benefit, and those who are hungry will not find themselves fed.
If you doubt this, consider this reality. For countless centuries farmers have fed humanity by saving the seed from one years crop to plant the following year. But Monsanto, the company that claims its motives are to help feed the hungry, has developed what it calls a “Technology Protection System” that renders seeds sterile. Commonly known as “terminator technology,” and developed with taxpayer funding by the USDA and Delta & Pine Land Company (an affiliate of Monsanto), the process genetically alters seeds so that their offspring will be sterile for all time. If employed, this technology would ensure that farmers cannot save their own seeds, but would have to come back to Monsanto year after year to purchase new ones.
Critics refer to these genetically engineered seeds as suicide seeds, and they are none too happy with them. “By peddling suicide seeds, the biotechnology multinationals will lock the world’s poorest farmers into a new form of genetic serfdom,” says Emma Must of the World Development Movement. “Currently 80 percent of crops in developing countries are grown using farm-saved seed. Being unable to save seeds from sterile crops could mean the difference between surviving and going under.”
To these companies, the terminator and other seed sterilizing technologies are simply business ventures that have been designed to produce profit. In this case, there is not even the implication of benefit to consumers. “Monsanto’s goal,” says Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly, “is effective control of many of the staple crops that presently feed the world.”
I wish I could speak more highly of GM foods and their potential. But the technology is now held tightly in the hands of corporations whose motives are, I’m afraid, very different from what they would have us believe.
Don’t buy the hype.
John
foodrevolution.org |
