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
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