Posted on 11-7-2003

GE Won't Feed World

Largely, genetic technologies will help feed the profits of big
corporations, says Dr Gyorgy Scrinis who writes in the Melbourne Age today.

Public opposition to genetically modified foods has been a stumbling block
to the commercialisation of GM crops and animals. The agri-biotech industry
is hoping GM foods with "consumer friendly" traits might overcome some of
this opposition. But they have also been running big advertising campaigns
in an attempt to convince the public that GM foods will be required to
"feed the world". These are the kinds of predictable arguments being aired
at the International Congress of Genetics in Melbourne.

In reality, the new genetic technologies will largely be used to feed the
power and profits of agri-food corporations, and they are more likely to
exacerbate rather than alleviate the problems of widespread hunger and
malnutrition in the Third World. GM products are primarily being developed
to fit into large-scale, chemical-intensive, mechanised and
capital-intensive farming systems. Any increase in yields of crop and
animal products will be headed for its usual destination: well-off consumers.

Research and development of GM products is largely aimed at adapting crops
and animals to the requirements of the global food industries. For example,
producing non-softening fruits for long-distance transportation so well-off
consumers can have access to year-round supplies of out-of-season fruits.
Genetic technologies are also facilitating the rapid corporate integration
and concentration of the food system, as a handful of corporations move
towards the ownership and effective control of every stage of the global
food system. One such strategy for monopoly control is the patenting of all
GM crops, with the aim of preventing farmers from saving and replanting
their own seeds. Overall, genetic technologies are facilitating a shift
from a chemical-industrial to what I call a "genetic-corporate" form of
agriculture - and this food system is undermining the food security of the
world's poor and malnourished.

Widespread hunger already exists today, in the context of a global
oversupply of food. This is one of the cruellest ironies of the
contemporary era. Most countries with the greatest incidence of poverty and
hunger are net exporters of food. Growing more food can, in fact,
exacerbate food insecurity for the world's poor depending on how, where and
by whom this food is produced. Genetically engineered crops and animals
further threaten the food security of the poor in a number of ways. First,
to the extent that they enable large-scale, chemical-industrial farms to
increase their productivity or profitability, this competitive advantage
will enable the further squeezingout of small-scale farmers. Second, GM
crops may accelerate the erosion of farm labouring work in poor rural areas
through the further introduction of labour-replacing technologies. Third,
by engineering crops to be sterile, and buying out smaller seed companies,
agri-food corporations aim to diminish the availability of unpatented and
self-reproducing seeds.

Proponents of GM food have celebrated the engineering of Vitamin A rice
(so-called "Golden Rice") as an example of a crop that - if and when it is
made freely available in a decade or so - will help alleviate malnutrition
in the Third World. Here is a breath-taking example of what I call the
"ideology of genetic precision". Such arguments effectively promote the
idea that malnutrition is the result of the nutritional inadequacy of
non-modified foods, and can be alleviated through the nutritional
modification of these foods, rather than the result of a lack of access to
an adequate and diverse diet. This isn't to deny that genetic technologies
could be used to modify traditional crops in ways that may benefit
small-scale, capital-poor farmers. But that is to miss the big picture in
terms of the primary direction of GE research, and in terms of the primary
causes of hunger and malnutrition.

What is actually required is a redistribution of fertile land, of incomes
and of economic power, rather than access to genetic products. There is an
obscene arrogance in the idea that GM crops will "feed the world", or that
the poor need to be fed by us. For in reality, poor people and communities
around the world will either feed themselves, or they will not feed at all.

Genetic-corporate agriculture is in fact a system for feeding on the world
rather than for feeding the world. It is about corporations and well-off
consumers continuing to feed on thefood, the cheap labour and other
extractable resources of the Third World; about large-scale industrial
producers consuming and displacing more small-scale and subsistence
producers and rural communities; and about transnational agri-food
corporations feeding on the work of more farmers by swallowing up and
patenting the seeds and knowledge developed by traditional farmers over
thousands of years.

Dr Gyorgy Scrinis is a research associate in the Globalism Institute at
RMIT University. Source: Melbourne Age 9 July 2003